


Hawkeye's War

by Shubatra



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Because there's gonna be a lot of them, Canon-Typical Violence, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Clint Barton is Still a Spy Guys, Difficult Decisions, Distaste for Politics, F/M, Family Feels, Found Family, Friends as Family, Fuck You Ross, Gen, Hawkdad is totally a thing, I hope you like words, Missing Scenes, Politics, Protective Clint Barton, Slowly-Building Worry, Talk of Mind Control, character exploration, kids being kids, talk of death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-24
Updated: 2016-07-13
Packaged: 2018-06-10 11:11:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 43,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6954082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shubatra/pseuds/Shubatra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint Barton had a list of reasons a mile long for not getting involved in the debate around the Sokovia Accords, from being retired to enjoying finally getting to spend plenty of time with his family to not liking the man who turned up at the Avengers Compound to present the document.</p>
<p>But when he got the call from an unknown German phone number, he found he had a few very good reasons to jump back into the fray - no matter what the risks to himself would be.</p>
<p>A Clint-centric story detailing his involvement in Civil War from start to finish and a little beyond.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> So I know I'm not the only one to be bothered by Clint just 'appearing' out of nowhere in CW and picking Wanda up with no explanation beyond "Cap needs our help." There were so many characters in this awesome movie that it was impossible to give them all the focus every single one of them deserves, but few of them were more shafted or handwaved than Clint (except maybe Scott). Love it or hate it, AoU gave him a few very good reasons to step down and leave the world-saving to other folks, and then to have him just turn up? After only one mention before that of him being definitively retired?
> 
> There had to be more to it than that.
> 
> Needless to say, my brain went into overdrive trying to figure out what exactly had gone on and why he would've left his family at the drop of the hat, and the more I thought about it the more I came to the conclusion that it was actually brewing far earlier than the phone call he must have had with Steve. And it started begging me to write it, to put it into order and make all the puzzle pieces line up, and so here we are. My exploration/explanation of what happened to Clinton Francis "Hawkeye" Barton through the entirety of Civil War, why he got involved, and why he _matters_ to the team, from the beginning until after the credits roll. It leans fairly heavily on my (admittedly extensive) headcanon for his past, but I think all the relevant bits are explained as they come up.
> 
> Please let me know if you spot any typos; I proofread this repeatedly but there's always the chance I missed one and I'd like to fix them if they're there. Thank you, and I hope you enjoy!

The first phone call came at 8:47 on a Saturday morning.

Clint was stuck at the kitchen table, trying to wipe down both the high chair and Nate's face as the baby happily burbled and grabbed for anything within reach, from the spoon Clint was using to feed him to Clint's nose whenever it came in range. Applesauce dribbled from his mouth in a trail down his chin, falling onto the bib, the tray of the high chair, and Nate himself as he waved his chubby little fists around. Clint barely jerked the spoon out of the way before his son could (once again) send his breakfast flying, grabbing the rag he was using to try and mitigate some of the mess before it congealed into lumps he'd have to get off with the putty scraper later.

“C'mon Bug, you've gotta work with me here- Crap,” he muttered as the tinny sounds of “Livin' On a Prayer” blared from his phone, stuck on the counter next to the fridge. “ _Coop!_ Come grab this for me, okay?”

The couch creaked dangerously as Cooper jumped off (he made a mental note to turn it over and see if the springs were finally falling out completely as Lila kept insisting), barreling into the kitchen to grab the phone. The song cut off as Cooper answered it, holding it up to his ear with all the proper manners that Laura had drilled into the kids and Clint undermined half the time. “This is Cooper, Dad's busy right- Auntie Nat!”

“ _I wanna talk to her I wanna talk to her!_ ” Lila was off the couch in a shot at hearing the name of her favorite relative, abandoning the rounds of cartoons in favor of something much more interesting. “ _Gimme the phone Cooper!_ ”

“You can have it when I'm done! Dad asked _me_ to get it and I wanna-”

“It's too early for this, kids!” Clint broke in, taking advantage of Nate's distraction by the noise his older siblings were making to run the towel over his face, wiping away most of the spilled applesauce. How had Laura done it alone for all those years he was constantly out on missions? Maybe it was a little easier with two kids instead of three like there were now, but the fact that Lila had been born when Cooper was barely three and not old enough to be reasoned with probably took away that slim advantage. “You both get four minutes to talk to her, then you give it to me, okay?”

“But _Dad-_ ”

“Three minutes and fifty-five seconds! Cooper first!”

Lila shot him a look that was a perfect copy of her aunt's, an expression designed entirely to guilt or shame him into doing what she wanted, but he'd spent far too long around the original source to be taken in by it and just raised his eyebrows at her. Cooper wouldn't want to give up the phone when his time was up, but he'd do it; Lila would have to be pried off when the end of her time came. She stuck her lower lip out and sulked back to the couch, folding her arms across her chest and flopping down into the cushions in a really amazing imitation of a petulant child.

“You better not make the hero worship even worse, Bug,” Clint murmured to Nate as Cooper chattered away behind him about what was happening in school and the model volcano they were building just for kicks. Clint kept an eye on the clock as he managed to get at least some of the remaining applesauce into the baby; when he called time, Cooper wiggled twenty extra seconds in saying goodbye and extracting a promise for Nat to come visit as soon as she could, then handed the phone to his sister as Clint started the process of hosing Nate down. When Lila's allotted time was up, he'd settled his youngest in the playpen in the living room with Cooper to keep an eye on him and managed to wipe up most of the mess baby-feeding had made, and turned to liberating his phone from his daughter chattering away a mile a minute. Some begging and pleading and a “Tell Uncle Steve I said hi!” later, Clint wedged the phone between his shoulder and his ear and returned to cleaning up the kitchen. “You need to call more so this doesn't happen every time.”

Nat's familiar chuckle was good to hear on the other end of the line. “Oh, I don't know, I wouldn't want them to get sick of me.”

“Sick of you? Not happening.” His senses were on alert at her words – something about her voice was just slightly off, more forced casualness than real ease. Probably no one else would be able to tell, but Clint had a level of perception that was higher than pretty much everyone else he'd ever met, as well as Nat being his best friend, partner, and surrogate sister. If anyone could tell when she had something on her mind, it was him, as she well knew. “...So I'm guessing this isn't a social call.” She gave a small sigh, and a tension knot immediately formed in his stomach. “You're not hurt, are you?”

“No, I'm not – a little banged up, but not really hurt. Rumlow tried to blow up an armored truck with me in it.”

“He _what_? You guys found him?”

“Finally. I'm guessing you haven't looked at the news yet, have you.”

“It's been kind of a zoo around here this morning, I had to bribe them with cartoons to get them to settle down.” Clint glanced at the living room, noting a dark brown and a sandy brown-blond head sitting on the couch and ostensibly watching TV, but obviously trying to listen in on his conversation over the noise it was making. He always caught them in their eavesdropping attempts but they kept trying anyway – something he was actually pretty proud of. They definitely got their stubbornness from him. Dropping the sponge he'd been holding in the sink, he turned on the water to give his hands a quick wash and cover up the sound of his words from his curious children. “Laura's friend needed some help setting up for a baby shower today, so she went over there earlier to give her a hand.”

“Just the hawk and his nestlings, then.”

“You got that right, I owe her apology flowers. A lot of them. Hang on- _Coop!_ Lila! I'm going out on the porch.”

“Okay, Dad!”

“Keep an eye on your brother and _no eavesdropping!_ ”

“ _Awwwww!_ ”

Another chuckle from Nat made him feel a little less apprehensive, though obviously something was still wrong if she'd led with being almost blown up as her starter. He knew there'd been some sort of mission in the works for a couple of weeks, but since he'd hung up his quiver he didn't ask for too many details and they mostly didn't volunteer them. Since he was only an Avenger in an auxiliary, call-me-if-the-world-is-actually-going-to-blow-up capacity now, he wasn't sure how much they were allowed or even wanted to tell him; the team seemed to be trying to preserve the life he'd chosen, and Nat at the minimum knew that if he got word of his closest friends being in danger (well, unusual amounts of danger for them) he'd probably rush off to help. 

Well aware that Lila at least would probably try and sneak up to the door so she could overhear her dad and her aunt talking, Clint grabbed one of the rocking chairs Laura had put on the porch and turned it so he could face the kitchen door, giving him a clear line of sight back into the house. “We're about as private as we're going to get now without me hiding in the Quin.” 

“They get that from you, you know.”

“And I'm damn proud of it. So what happened?”

She sighed, much more heavily this time, and Clint's heart started to sink; Nat only allowed herself to show that she was worn down when things had truly fucked up. “Rumlow was spotted in Nigeria about a month ago. Once we heard about that, we contacted the Nigerian government, gave them the facts, and asked if we could help them with what looked like a potential terrorist situation. Heavily armed groups of mercenaries were hitting police stations, taking weapons and a few other things they didn't want to talk about, they were worried their task forces wouldn't be up to facing them, sound familiar?”

“Too much. Same pattern as in Guatemala?”

“Almost exactly, which makes sense since he was STRIKE. He knew all those tactics from having to take them apart for years. Steve and Vision took the information they gave us and what we knew, worked out the pattern and the likely next target, and we went in undercover in Lagos. Rhodey was under obligation to the Air Force already and we thought Vision would draw too much attention, so it was Wanda, Sam, Cap, and me. Only it turned out their target wasn't the police station. It was the IFID.”

His already sinking heart plummeted through the wood at his feet. “Shit.”

“Mmm.” She paused, her attention caught by something he couldn't hear, and as she responded to the question the pieces started coming together in his brain. He'd been with S.H.I.E.L.D. far too long to not know the patterns of terrorists, despots, and amoral mercenaries, and there were only a few variations on this theme that were possible. “They broke in, took a biological weapon, but we managed to stop them and recover it. He had about twenty men all together and we subdued most of them, had to kill a couple, but his couriers and Rumlow himself escaped; Steve and Wanda tailed Rumlow while Sam and I chased the other four to get the weapon back. Steve cornered him, but Rumlow had a suicide bomb.”

“He's not-”

“No, he's okay,” she quickly broke in. “Wanda saved him, used her powers to contain the blast, lifted Rumlow off the ground and away...”

“...Nat, just tell me.”

There was another pause, one where she was probably looking around her to make sure she couldn't be overheard, before her voice dropped below the already quiet tone she'd been using to the point where he was glad his hearing implants were as sensitive as they were. “You know she's still learning how to control her powers and what she can do. She saved Steve from being ripped apart, but all that kinetic energy had to go somewhere, and she did her best. But her shield was failing and she panicked a little, and she didn't move it far away _enough_. It went off next to the building they were at about eight stories up. Right next to it. At least twenty-five people are dead and more are injured, including a group of Wakandans who'd come as part of a humanitarian outreach program.”

“Oh, God.” Collateral damage was unfortunately a common occurrence of their field of work – villains usually didn't care what they destroyed in the pursuit of their goals – but it was so very different when you were the one who had caused it. He and Nat were more used to it, with their espionage backgrounds and plenty of missions they'd been sent on not going as cleanly as they'd all hoped they would, and even Cap, Sam, and Rhodey knew the dangers with their experience in the military. That didn't mean you stopped hoping that it wouldn't happen this time, that you didn't regret it if something went wrong. And for a young woman who'd already been through so much in her life, had been the victim of collateral damage herself multiple times, having her good deed go so incredibly wrong had to be ripping her to shreds. “How is she?”

“She's wrecked. We're still about four hours out of base in the Quin, and she's spent the last several hours in a ball in the chair Bruce used to use. It's all so familiar in a way that no one wanted.”

“I bet.” While Banner had eventually come to some sort of acceptance of what he could do and occasionally had to do, he'd never stopped regretting having to do it in the first place. Clint was grateful for it: that regret meant Banner retained his humanity, more so than the doctor probably realized he did. Wanda sharing that tendency was at least reassuring that she wasn't heading down the darker paths that her abilities opened up for her, but the fact that it had happened at all tore him apart. She was just a kid... “Do I need to come out there?”

“I hate to pull you away, but it'd probably be for the best. She's getting better with me and Steve, but you're still the one she turns to first. It might be good for her to spend some time at the farm, too.”

“Okay. Laura's due home between two and three, let me talk to her about it and get the kids settled before I fly out. I should be there around seven.”

“Thanks, Clint. Tell the kids I'll see them as soon as I can.”

“You got it. See you later, Nat.” He listened for the beep of the call disconnecting, then sighed heavily and leaned his head back against the chair, staring at the roof of the porch above them. Nat was definitely tired, Sam was probably frustrated, Steve was likely blaming himself, and Wanda was a wreck. It was too late to fix what had happened in Lagos, but he could at least help the team get themselves back together. Maybe he was retired, but they were still his mess.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

After Laura had returned home and he'd briefed her on what had happened that morning, she'd practically thrown him out of the house herself and tossed his go bag after him, telling him to go take care of his protege and that she'd get the guest room ready for Wanda. After Nat, Wanda was the most frequent visitor they'd hosted since Novi Grad, and Laura had unilaterally declared, without input from her husband, that the Barton farm was the young woman's home as long as she wanted it to be. Cooper and Lila were fascinated with her, and she seemed to adore Nate, so overall the situation worked to everyone's advantage. Clint simply considered himself lucky that another stray that followed him home was so warmly accepted by his family, since a stable place with quiet, steady life and no potentially deadly conflict was something the young woman hadn't had since the age of ten and was desperately needed.

It also meant that when Wanda needed him he had three (soon to be four) pairs of hands shoving him out the door.

Years before, Clint had hollowed out a hidden “room” in the trees on the farm where he could stash any unusual vehicles he showed up in, mostly using it for air transport. After the Avengers were reformed following HYDRA's exposure, Tony had “found” and modified a S.H.I.E.L.D. Quinjet for him to “keep an eye on” so he could get to and from Avengers Tower as fast as possible. When he'd stepped back from the team, it had been made very clear to him that as far as anyone else was concerned, the Quinjet was his to keep, even if Tony had threatened to take away his oversized Micro Machine more than once. Clint in return kept his hand at least vaguely in the game by making trips to the new facility at least once a month or as requested to help out with training, adapting the new members to the odd dynamics of working as part of such a disparate group, or purely for social visits. “Retired” meant he was no longer chasing arms dealers around the globe five days a week, after all, not that he'd completely abandoned his friends.

He set the autopilot for the only location he used the Quin for nowadays – the compound – activated stealth mode so he wouldn't give any air controllers watching a heart attack, set an alarm to tell him when he was ten miles out from his target, and settled back in the pilot's chair to study the news reports and footage from the Lagos incident on the built-in projection computer. There wasn't much of the second since it had been a covert op, at least in theory, and the news cameras hadn't had time to descend before everything was over, but some people had activated cameras on smartphones and all the major networks were showing as much of that as they could get away with. There were a lot of shots of bodies flying past, probably Nat and Sam chasing the runaway mercenaries, and more of Cap's distinctive uniform speeding past so quickly he was little more than a blue blur. A man clad in what looked like a horrible ripoff of Rhodey's War Machine armor was visible for a few frames that the news networks helpfully paused on to explain that this was indeed Brock Rumlow, HYDRA mole and all-around grade-A asshole that had tried to kill Nat and Steve on multiple occasions two years previously. Clint once again felt his blood beginning to boil at the thought of how long he'd worked alongside Rumlow, not particularly friendly with him but not enemies either, and how easily he'd turned on them all when he'd had the chance. Whatever else had happened that morning, there was no way he'd deny himself the feeling of satisfaction that that traitor was dead.

The news people on the op-ed shows were giving their own opinions of the carnage that had resulted from the op, and nearly everything he heard left a sour taste in his mouth. While none of them were outright blaming Wanda for the explosion, over half of them danced so close to the subject he expected them to trip over their own toes. It was clear that most of that set did put the blame entirely on her and not the lunatic that had strapped a suicide bomb to himself, and only the potential of getting sued for defamation by the Avengers as a whole and Tony in particular were keeping them from saying it outright. The rest of them were probably leaning on her guilt as a way to generate interest for their shows and networks, or draw attention through controversy. Of the rest, most of them admitted she'd had to react quickly to a terrible situation – enough phones had caught the final confrontation that it was obvious that a bomb would have killed not only Cap and Wanda but probably at least thirty other people who'd decided to stay to watch the spectacle instead of getting the hell out of there when superheroes showed up – but only a few were saying she'd done the best she could under the circumstances. There was a lot of vague suggesting that she had too much power to be trusted in the field and that it would probably escape from her at the least opportune moment, and Clint briefly descended into a string of cussing before muting the reports and inspecting the various videos himself. These people who were so quick to pass judgment – how in the hell could they know what it was like to be in a life-or-death situation like that, having to take the best option you could find even if it wasn't perfect? It was lucky for them that none of them were on the Quin with him, as he wouldn't have hesitated to take out his anger on them. 

But there – he paused playback on a shot of Wanda after the explosion, and there it was, sheer horror on her face, her eyes wide like a frightened deer, clearly shaking and collapsing in on herself even in a still shot. Anyone who couldn't see just how much she was suffering was driving spikes through their own eyeballs. And there – a messy edit later, there she was again, even worse, as Cap carried her away from the scene. She'd shrunk in on herself so much that she was completely dwarfed by Cap's large frame, appearing the child she hadn't been for years in her shock and grief. Texts from Nat had filled in some of the blanks: with Rumlow gone, they'd turned over his mooks to Nigerian Special Forces before meeting with the president and his advisers for a debriefing. Wanda had barely been able to speak but she'd apologized for what had happened, apparently begging forgiveness for what she'd caused. The president had let them go (it'd been really obvious he wanted to see the back of them), and the team had loaded into their Quin and flown back to New York as soon as they could break away. Wanda had locked herself into self-imposed quarantine as soon as they'd gotten back to the facility, and no one was yet willing to force her to come out. It hadn't been a good day for any of them.

When the proximity alarm went off, Clint sent Nat a text to warn her he was on approach and turned off the cloaking, retaking manual control of the craft to bring it to a landing in the row next to the other aircraft housed at the facility. As he settled smoothly onto the strip, he could see two figures standing in the doorway: Steve and Nat, who waited for the wind of the quintuple jets to die down before making their way out to meet him. He grabbed his bag and phone and lowered the bay door, locking it up as they finished crossing the grass.

“Good to see you,” Nat said, reaching out to give him a hug which he returned a little tighter than he normally would have. She moved more carefully than he was used to, an obvious clue that her exertions several hours before had left more of an impact on her than she wanted to admit; but since he couldn't spot any bloody wounds or bandages under her clothing, he decided to let it be unless she gave him an ideal opening.

“Hi, Clint,” Steve said with a friendly but very tired smile, looking more weary than Clint had seen him since Sokovia. “Sorry to pull you out here.”

“I wouldn't have come if I didn't want to,” he responded – it was self-evident, but it still deserved repeating. “And that doesn't even get started on Laura's orders when I told her about it.”

Nat gave a tired smile of her own. “Let me guess – bring her home for tea, cookies, coloring books, and playtime?”

“If she wants to come, yeah, Laura's getting the bed ready. Unless something ridiculous comes up you guys should have about a week before things get weird again, and that'd hopefully be enough time for her to get her feet back under herself. She pulled together pretty well in Sokovia, but...” Clint shrugged as the group headed for the door, hiking his pack over his shoulder.

“Life or death situations tend to do that to you.” Steve sounded more weary than resigned, and Clint's attention shifted to watching the details of his movement, the squint in his eye. Something else was bothering the super soldier, something big, and probably something that he didn't want to talk about. They'd just have to see about that later.

“Right. We all know it, _she_ knows it, but she's been doing this a lot less time than we have. Those reactions aren't locked in yet, especially since that ended the threat and she probably had a massive adrenaline crash. If she wants to get away from here for awhile, we're isolated as hell out there, no one'd expect her to be in Iowa of all places, and I can unplug the TV so she can't see any of the news footage.”

“If she wants to go, she's got clearance. We know you'll watch out for her.” Steve's phone chose that moment to beep at him and vibrate with a message. Pulling it from his pocket, he shook his head at the screen. “Sorry, I have to go take care of this. Your room's ready, and we told Wanda you were coming. See if you can get her to eat something, all right?” he called over his shoulder as he split off from Clint and Nat at the elevator doors, and Clint called an affirmation in his wake as they boarded the car to take them to the fifth floor. 

“We told her you were coming, but I'm not sure she heard it.” Nat's voice was pitched slightly lower than necessary, but given some of the residents of the facility, the precaution was probably a good idea if they didn't want anyone to snoop. “She didn't say anything when I told her, but she didn't give any other kind of reaction, either. She's really taking this hard.” 

“In her shoes, wouldn't you?” 

“I can't say. You know they trained that out of me a long time ago.”

“Yeah, and I know you didn't lose it _all_ , or I wouldn't trust you around my kids as far as I could throw Stark in full armor.” Clint paused as the elevator reached the levels housing the living quarters and offices and the doors opened, glancing at the stairs that would take them to Wanda's room as well as his own on the sixth floor. If she had her mental feelers out, this was probably the closest they could get without her overhearing everything on accident. “Do you think this is the best idea?”

Nat could only shrug slightly, wincing just a bit as she did. She reached across to her left shoulder, rubbing it in a display of vulnerability she would usually only show in front of him. “I'm not sure, but I think it's the best we're going to get. She needs comfort right now, she needs _normal_. We're a team, but normal's not something she's going to get around here. Changing diapers, star gazing, and getting stuffed full of brownies will help a lot more. And there's the press to consider.”

“Press- fuck, you've gotta be kidding me,” he groaned.

“Afraid not. That's what Steve went to take care of.” She made a very pointed face at the thought; being in front of the cameras didn't come naturally to either of them given all their training in staying unknown and their dedication to keeping their lives and pasts secret, but after HYDRA's fall Nat had chosen to throw herself into the spotlight. Clint heartily wished her luck with that, refusing multiple times to trade places with her. “We're going to have to run a press conference tomorrow about what happened; some of Tony's people are arriving tonight to get everything set up. We may need Wanda to make a statement, so if she wants to leave you probably won't get out until mid-afternoon.” Another sigh. “Some of them are already trying to chew us up and spit us out over this, so we need to do some damage control. Another glorious day in the life of a superhero.”

“Better you than me.” He glanced at the stairs again, then shrugged his bag off his shoulder and held it out to her. “Throw this in my room for me? I'm gonna go see if she'll let me in. If she hasn't put anything in her system in twelve hours she'll be passing out soon and that's the last thing she needs on top of emotional trauma.”

She gave him a smile as she took the bag, looping it over her shoulder and starting to head in the direction of her own room – like he'd expected. “Think I'll hold this ransom instead. Come find me before you go to sleep and give me an update.”

“Aye-aye, Romanoff,” he said with a mocking salute, starting up the stairs to the next floor.

Wanda's room was the first one at the top of the stairs; she'd said the noise people made as they went up and down and the elevators rose and fell was less of a problem for her than what her mental powers could detect, so she might as well have the place with the most traffic and spare the rest of them. Normally that made it very easy to tell if she was in her room, as a glance up the stairs would show if she'd left the door open for visitors, but at the moment the door was tightly shut even though he knew she was in there. Probably locked, too, but he wouldn't pick it unless there was a dire emergency and the situation hadn't reached that level yet. Clint paused before knocking on her door, closing his eyes to listen as hard as he could for any other sounds of people around or anything coming from Wanda's room itself, but aside from the faint _clink_ of Nat closing her own door on the floor below nothing reached his ears. 

Taking a deep breath, he raised a fist and knocked. “Wanda, it's Clint. Can you open your door?”

Nothing answered him. He knocked again, waited twenty seconds, then tried a third time, but for all he knew the room behind that door was completely empty and he was just making a fool of himself. He sighed, letting his head rest against the door and placing both hands palm-flat on it.

“God I hate doing this.”

Closing his eyes, Clint pulled his focus inward in a controlled exercise of the precise focus that came over him in combat situations or on the archery range. He thought about _himself_ , what made him who he was, that core of truth of his being, and when he had that set in mind he pushed _out_ with it in front of him. Some of the people he'd worked with over the course of his S.H.I.E.L.D. career had talked about being able to sense auras, and that was pretty much the only description he had for what he occasionally did to get Wanda's attention: projecting his own aura for anyone who could read it to pick up. The feeling of surety with a bow in his hand, the memory of Nate dribbling his breakfast down his chin from that morning, the feel of Laura's hair against his cheek, running for his life through a back alley in Montreal, laughing with the other Avengers at the party before Ultron's birth, so many more times and places in his life beyond that – he took all of that and tried to shove it through the door, tried to reach the girl he could detect was there through his trained awareness of occupied space. After experiencing Loki's control, giving up so much of himself felt invasive and wrong, but occasionally it was needed.

The lock disengaged.

Pushing the door open, Clint stepped in and crossed to where Wanda was sitting on her bed, propped up by pillows against the headboard and holding one of them in her arms exactly like Lila did with some of her stuffed animals. She didn't look up when he entered, but neither did she throw him back out the door in a blazing streak of red like she once had Sam when he had the bad luck to open her door at a very rotten time. He nudged the door shut with his boot and walked over to stand next to the bed. “Hey, kid.”

For several moments Wanda didn't really react to his presence. She wasn't locked away inside herself, catatonic and unresponsive, but she didn't raise her eyes to meet his and she pulled her feet a little closer to herself, assuming a more defensive, closed-off posture. When she did speak, her voice was a little creaky from not having been used in half a day after a severe crying jag.

“Natasha called you.”

“Course she did. She's gotta keep me updated on you guys.” It was no use pretending that she didn't know that he knew exactly what happened, and he'd found out in Sokovia that Wanda took well to being direct – which was a good thing, everything else considered, since it was him she'd latched onto after her brother had died and even before. Reaching over, he grabbed the chair from her desk, spinning it to face the bed and taking a seat. “She told me what happened, and I looked at the news reports on the way over.”

Her head dipped forward a little more, the pillow clutched to her chest. “Then you saw. You know that I killed so many people, after I promised I wouldn't do any such thing again after Ultron.”

“And I know you saved a lot of people, including yourself, your team leader, and by my count based on very fuzzy cell phone footage taken by someone who seemed to be putting it through a cheese grater, about thirty civilians who thought it was a spectator sport.” There was no huge response to his stupid quip, but at least she didn't roll in on herself anymore. Not having her fall into the hole of self-doubt was a good start. “I've been around this circus too long to not know that sometimes things go wrong. We're never able to save everyone.”

“I know,” she said quietly, her head moving just enough to tell him that her eyes had gone to the memorial she kept for her brother – the few personal items she'd been able to salvage, photos of him Vision had helped her locate through scouring the web. Clint's own heart tightened as it always did at that reminder of what they'd lost to make it this far; he'd give almost anything to hear that cocky, annoying voice again, and he knew Wanda would give so much more than that.

“Yeah. I know.” He reached forward, being careful to broadcast his moments, and when Wanda didn't object he set his hand on her head, giving her some human contact without overwhelming her. “When you get into this life, you're mostly never told about what you're risking. You just kind of have to figure it out as you go along and decide if the risk is worth it. You've got powers that no one else in this world has, and you don't even know everything you can do yet. Of course not everything's gonna go perfectly.”

“But it was not supposed to go this wrong.” She moved at last, lifting her head up to meet his gaze, and he dropped his hand to her shoulder to make it easier for her. “I cannot just ignore what I've done, and there's no way to take it back. Those people did not have to die.”

“No, they didn't. But you didn't have to, either. You don't ignore it. Ignoring it means you didn't do it, that you don't have any responsibility for it. But you take it, you use it, you work to get better. Blame the asshole that strapped a bomb to his chest – I guarantee you he deserves it and I would've put an arrow through him given half a chance – and take what you're feeling and use it to improve yourself and your control.”

Her eyes met his, green and so full of regrets that he could almost feel her powers pulling him in to drown in his on remorse over past actions. “You say that like it's easy.”

“Of course it's not easy. But you chose what you wanted to do, you chose to use your gifts to help people instead of hurt them. If you let this defeat you, then those people will have died for nothing. And after all the hell you've been through to get where you are, I don't think that's what you want.”

Silence fell for several moments as she looked down at her knees and the pillow she was clutching, her fingers twisting around themselves a little as she thought over his words. Clint wasn't dumb, he knew he hadn't said anything any other member of the team wouldn't have told her, but for some reason she was more willing to listen to him than to the others, though she was trusting Steve more and more as the weeks passed. No big surprise there; Steve was the most honest and genuinely good person they knew, aside from Laura, and he inspired confidence and trust in everyone around him. It was kind of more surprising that Wanda wasn't warming up to him _faster_.

Since there weren't murderous robots waiting outside the door to rip them limb from limb this time, he let her take her time to think about what she wanted to say, what she wanted to do. Clint let his hand drop from her shoulder, lacing his fingers loosely together and bracing his arms on his knees as he waited, watching every movement she made and mentally translating them into thoughts. Doubt, guilt, fear – the usual smorgasbord after an agent's first bad op. He could remember so many times in S.H.I.E.L.D. history when he'd seen that same set of reactions in other agents after something went wrong – most recently when HYDRA had fallen, and he'd had to defend his own life by ending others. 

“I do not want to be afraid,” she began slowly, and he waited, still watching her as she sorted through her confused feelings. “I do not want this to happen again, and the easy solution to that would be to not use my powers any more.”

“But can you not use them?” Clint didn't even fight the compulsion to ask, and from the lack of surprise on her face, Wanda was thinking the same thing. “You've had them for over two years now, and you've gotten used to having them. You unlocked the door that way to let me in just now. It's a part of you now, whatever anyone else thinks about them, and you can't just cut out part of yourself. I may be retired now but I can't just stop shooting a bow. Ask my kids.”

The corner of her mouth twitched, probably an involuntary almost-smile that he decided to count as a point in his favor. “I'm sure, I've seen you.”

“Well you can see it more and ask them yourself. Everyone's waiting for you to come out and stay with us, and Steve's given you clearance to get out of here for a few days.”

“They want me to come? Even knowing what happened, they want me there?”

Clint shrugged, raising a hand to scratch at the back of his head. “Nate obviously doesn't know, and we kept the details kind of fuzzy for Lila but she knows a bad accident happened and people were hurt and Laura'll fill in the rest before we get there. Coop and Laura both know the whole story and want you to come. We broke out the glitter supply so the kids could make you a banner, so I'm blaming you for when I keep finding it in my socks for the next six months.”

There was no maybe this time; Wanda definitely smiled at that joke, a small one, but definitely a smile. Clint knew immediately she'd start pulling together at that. “I suppose if you're going to blame me, I might as well do something to earn that blame.”

“You got that right. Come on.” He pushed up off the chair and Wanda instinctively knew what he wanted, shifting on her bed to give him room to sit in the space she cleared for him. He reached out and drew her into a hug as she tucked herself into his chest, one of her hands resting over his heart as his nose got buried in her hair. “It'll be okay, kid. There's nothing wrong with you, and you're not a monster. You just need more practice.”

“I can't let that happen again. I _won't_ let that happen again.”

“That's what the practice is for. We'll work on that at the farm. Tony never did get around to fixing the tractor so we can use that as a test subject.”

She didn't respond, just clutched tighter to his jacket, taking deep breaths and letting them out slowly. Clint let her steady herself, holding on to her until he felt her fingers loosening from his clothing a little, then nodded and started pushing himself to his feet. It went more awkwardly than normal since Wanda initially didn't want to let go, but he took her hand in his and pulled her to her feet after him, checking her pulse in her fingertips and wrist surreptitiously and watching the flit of emotions across her face. Not all the way together yet, not by a long shot. But the first steps were there, and that was good enough for the moment. The television would definitely be unplugged when they got to the farm; at least the kids were used to going long periods without watching it, since neither of their parents liked it all that much.

“Let's go get some toast and water into you. Maybe an apple if your stomach can take it.”

“I think I can handle tea.”

Clint made an exaggerated face. “I don't know how you and Laura can stand that stuff. It's no substitute for even shit coffee.” 

“Not everyone drinks enough coffee to put a Starbucks out of business, Clint,” she said with a small smile, and he smiled back, happy to hear some humor in her voice again and wanting it to remain there.

“I wouldn't drink that crap without six shots of espresso in it. But if you want tea, we'll make it along with the coffee.”

“Good enough,” she replied, her eyes glowing slightly red as the door swung open behind them. “There's no one in the kitchen now. Let's go.”


	2. Part Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who read the first part of my story, everyone who left kudos, and Cerusee for a wonderfully sweet comment. I'm _hoping_ to keep updating this once a week until it's done, so for anyone looking for it, Tuesdays are probably going to be the days I'll update barring anything going weird in real life. I've decided to start sharing a little trivia about inspirations for things in this story after the chapters, so check out the ending notes for fun facts if that's something that interests you :)
> 
> Forgot to mention this last time, but my musical accompaniment while writing the first part was "Abraham's Daughter" by the Arcade Fire. For part two here, it's "Safe and Sound" by the Civil Wars featuring Taylor Swift and "Aviation High" by Semi Precious Weapons. 
> 
> Thank you for tuning in to continue this story, or for clicking for the first time if that's what you're doing! I sincerely hope you like words, because there's even more of them this time. As always, if you spot any typos, please let me know so I can fix them. And now, enjoy!

They left the next day after the press conference had concluded and they'd all had a chance to eat something before they fell down. Steve and Nat were both starting to come out in spectacular bruises, which only made sense considering what they'd been doing the day before. Wanda had managed her part of the conference well, obviously still shattered but managing to speak clearly and with only one or two stumbles as she read the statement she'd prepared the night before with Clint and Natasha's help. Clint had mostly kept out of that one, though; he'd never been one for anything but plain speaking, as all the Avengers well knew, but he was easily able to tell them when something sounded too polished and thus insincere. Wanda's very real grief had to come through the words she was speaking, saying what she felt and not what everyone else thought people wanted to hear. All in all, she'd handled herself as well as could be expected, and after the news people were gone she'd managed to eat a sandwich and a handful of celery sticks before they'd loaded her and her gear on the Quin. The other Avengers came out to see them off, giving her hugs or handshakes according to their natures, and the Quin was in the air again for its return flight after very little time. 

Wanda was mostly silent on the way to the farm, strapped in her chair and paging through a small notebook. Clint had set the autopilot and then moved to one of the passenger chairs near her in case she wanted anything, spending his time scrolling through the tablet Tony had given him and making a grocery list. After about half an hour he managed to get her interested in adding to it, telling her to put any ingredients she wanted for Sokovian dishes on it because the kids had been asking about her native food. It was a blatant lie but it served to wake her up some and get her involved in actively doing something again, and the kids would go along with it when he asked them to since it would make her happy. Still, the ride wasn't as easy as he'd hoped it would be. The second-guessing and regret had definitely come along on the trip, and all he could do was hope that the farm would restore some of that inner certainty. 

When they flew in under the trees and to the little clearing for the Quin about an hour and a half after leaving the compound, Clint could see Cooper and Lila waiting at the “safe” marker made out of a bandanna tied to a branch, the absolute closest he'd let them come to his private landing pad unless the house was exploding. Sending Wanda out before him, he took as much time as he could to shut down the jet and close everything up again before grabbing the bags and heading out to join the crowd. Sure enough, Wanda had his daughter in her arms and propped on her hip even though she was just about too big for that, and Cooper was sticking as close to her as he could without tripping either of them into the ground cover. Wanda was also smiling again, the first _true_ smile he'd seen her make, though he knew it wouldn't last long. She was too shaken by what had happened, but the enthusiasm his children greeted her with was impossible to brush off and had lifted her cloud at least temporarily. 

Laura had stayed in the house with Nate and was getting an early start on dinner when the group tramped in the back door. The counter was lined with bottles and jars and a big mixing bowl with a whisk in it, and as he glanced over the ingredients Clint could feel his mouth start to water. “You're doing barbecue?”

“I thought it would be good. It's not too complicated and it lasts in the fridge – and get back outside, Clint! Cooper, Lila, you too! It's really good to see you again, Wanda,” Laura added with a smile.

“Why are- oh,” he said as he looked down, noticing the muddy footprints his boots had started tracking over the floor. “Uhh, yes ma'am – stay out there, kids.” 

“How come Wanda gets to come in and we don't?” Lila pouted as she and her brother scrubbed their sneakers on the mat while the young woman passed around them to head to Laura. “Her shoes are muddy, too!”

“Because _she'll_ help me clean it up, unlike the rest of you,” her mother retorted while giving the young woman in front of her a big hug before looking at her husband. “And Clint, you left your grout out again, Nate got into it and tried to eat it. Cooper stopped him, thankfully.”

He winced – it had been awhile since they had a baby in the house, and with the semi-emergency the day before had turned into he'd kind of forgotten some of the safety steps he had to take with some of his equipment so accidents didn't happen. “Sorry, it won't happen again. Thanks, buddy.” Reaching over to ruffle Cooper's hair, he grinned when his eldest son winced and knocked his hand away. “Finally getting embarrassed by your old man?”

“ _Daaaad_ , not in front of _Wanda_ ,” Cooper hissed under his breath so only Clint could hear – or so he thought. As the ten-year-old stalked through the door, Clint raised his gaze to meet the eyes of both of the women waiting for them. And with the way Laura raised her eyebrows with a little smile and Wanda blinked in confusion it was obvious they'd both heard, which meant Lila was the only one who hadn't as she'd skipped on ahead into the living room. Clint bit his lip to keep from grinning as he wiped his own boots off on the mat.

Laura hid her smile by turning away and giving Wanda a gentle push to the stairs. “The guest room's all made up for you and the bathroom's got clean towels in it if you'd like to freshen up. If you want to lie down until dinner, I can send someone up to make sure you're awake.” 

“Thank you, no. I've slept enough this last day and a half.” Wanda was already lifting a hand, red dancing at the end of her fingertips as she picked the clumps of dirt off the kitchen floor and sent them sailing through the still open door. Clint stepped out of the way of the flying mud without even blinking, then tossed his bag in the direction of the laundry room to unload later. Red mist appeared around Wanda's suitcase and the guitar case he'd talked her into bringing, floating out of his hands and in the direction of their owner. “I'll put these away and come-”

“ _I'll do it!_ ” Lila crowed, flying back into the kitchen to grab the suitcase, which Wanda very wisely didn't set down since it was unlikely the seven-year-old would be able to get it back up again. “I wanna help! I wanna see what pretty dresses you brought this time!”

“Me too!” Cooper only seemed to realize what he'd implied after he grabbed the guitar case, turning a red that almost matched Wanda's mist and immediately verbally backspacing. “I-I mean, I'll help too, I wanna show her our volcano.”

Clint could feel Laura's eye on the back of his head as he turned away to slap a hand over his mouth and bite back his laughter at Cooper's awkward attempts to impress Wanda, and he made himself very busy removing his boots and closing the door so he wouldn't catch her eyes and lose it. Laura's gaze slid off him as she sent the group upstairs; Clint heard Wanda stop by the playpen and bend down to give Nate a soft kiss on his head before following the two older children. When he heard their footfalls in the upstairs hallway he couldn't hold it back any longer, leaning against the door as he laughed, wiping the corners of his eyes with his thumbs to remove the traces of tears that were leaking out.

“It's not that funny,” Laura said as she came up behind him, though her tone of voice easily betrayed the amusement she herself was feeling.

“It's goddamn hilarious is what is it.” He turned around just in time for her palm to thwack against his chest in punishment for swearing; she didn't want their children to pick up the bad habits of their father or pretty much anyone associated with him before it was completely unavoidable, and it was hard enough to keep them from hearing bad language the few times Fury made it out to visit. But she was smiling as she looked up at him, raising her hands to loop around his neck and draw him down for a kiss. Clint happily complied, holding her petite body against his for several moments, before breaking away with another grin. “He's gotta get it from you. I thought girls had cooties until I was twelve.” 

“And you think I was interested in dating before I was fourteen? You're still not any good with romance, Hawkeye,” she replied with a mischievous glint in her eye.

“Good enough that you put up with me.”

“Or maybe I just felt sorry for you.”

“That too,” he agreed, pulling her back in for another kiss, both of their arms tightening around each other for several moments before they broke for air. Kissing her forehead softly, Clint let her go and moved to scoop up his pack and take it properly to the laundry room.

Laura followed him, standing in the door as he pulled his clothes from the bag and dropped them in the laundry basket. “I sent the kids out to play and watched the conference. She did well.”

“We can thank Nat for that, I just told them when something was too plastic. Do you see my keys anywhere?”

The jingling of metal against wood told him that Laura had bent and scooped them off the floor, tucking them into the pocket of his jeans as he hung up the bag. “You know she looks up to you. Nat called last night and told me you got her out of her room, and not even Steve could make that happen. You don't give yourself enough credit.”

He grimaced, the side of his mouth pulling tight with regret. “I don't deserve it, not after what she lost.” Laura's small hand slipped into his and he laced his fingers in hers, gripping them tightly for a moment. “I'm a horrible substitute for the only family she had left.”

“You care about her, and that's all she needs. You cared about Nat, too, and look what she's become. I wish Pietro was still alive - he sent you home to us, and I wish I could thank him for that - but you can give her something she wouldn't have had even with him.” Clint couldn't help but smile a little as Laura talked; she was so much smarter than he was, so much better a person. It'd been eighteen years since they'd met and he was still surprised almost every day that such a warm, wonderful woman had been willing to marry him and even more surprised that she'd stayed with him through the utter insanity that had been his career. “She hasn't had a real home since she was ten. You can give her one. We can all give her a family.”

Clint couldn't resist looking back at her with a smirk. “Even Cooper?”

His wife thwacked him in the chest again with her free hand. “Your hormones woke up first and you got me pregnant. He's your fault.”

“Maybe. But I remember you were really into the getting-you-pregnant part.” His hand crept around her waist, sliding into the back pocket of her pants and resting nicely against the curve of her butt, starting to pull her closer to him.

She hit his chest again and pulled away, softening her denial with a kiss on the cheek before she went back to the counter to finish mixing up the barbecue sauce. “We've got guests _and_ kids still awake, so that'll have to wait. Now go say hi to your son, he's been a handful today. Which he _definitely_ gets from you.”

“Yes, ma'am.” With a grin and one last quick kiss as he passed her in the kitchen, Clint tuned his awareness briefly upstairs to make sure that nothing had collapsed yet; the light steps of his children's' feet and an echo of Lila's chatter drifting down the stairs was enough to relieve that concern. Nate's playpen was set up in the living room in clear view of the kitchen so Laura could keep an eye on him while she was working, and as Clint walked over he pulled himself to his feet gripping the rails with barely any shaking in his legs. Clint's grin widened as his son smiled and reached for him, babbling nonsense at the sight of his father. “Hey, Bug,” he said, reaching down to lift the baby into his arms where Nate immediately latched onto his shirt with sticky little fingers. “You've been giving your mama trouble? You know that's not what the man of the house does, you're gonna have to work on that. You wanna help me with a project?” 

“ _Clint_ ,” came Laura's voice without missing a beat. “He's not even a year old and you still haven't finished the tiling in the bathroom yet!”

“Not that kind of project! Come on Nate, this'll be quick.” 

Their television was an older model that they'd bought on budget back when the one they'd had when they'd first moved into the house had died. Seeing a very basic model in the rec room had nearly driven Tony to tears at one point, and Clint had had to threaten to punch him in the nose to stop him from replacing it “before you emotionally stunt your children,” but all the fancy tricks and settings just weren't important to them (not to mention suddenly having a TV that was _above_ the top of the line would make the neighbors suspicious on the rare times they came over). Clint had meant it when he said he'd disable the TV for the extent of Wanda's stay, and he propped Nate on his hip so he could reach behind it and yank the power cable out of the wall. If the family reached a consensus on watching a movie one night he'd plug it back in, but until she was back at the compound, he was going to have absolute control over the machine. This was about making her feel at ease and helping her get her emotional center back, and the talking heads on the news would sweep all that away.

“Did I miss anything besides Nate trying to eat grout while I was gone?” he called as he hid the remote away behind his stacks of old movies that the kids didn't yet want to touch (though Cooper was starting to get over that).

“Sylvia finally got back to me and said she only needs me after the school year ends for about a week.” Laura was an artist by training, a talented painter who worked mostly in watercolors, but once the kids had started coming she'd mostly given it up professionally because she didn't have time to dedicate to it like she wanted to. In order to avoid boredom and get herself out of the house, though, a few years back she'd taken a job as a receptionist at the middle school about fifteen miles away where the students absolutely adored her. Not that Clint could blame them. “We can finally go on that trip now that Nate's old enough to travel.”

“That sounds fun. Were you thinking of anywhere specific?”

“Maybe Big Cedar Lodge. Lila was talking about water skiing.”

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

Since the kids had grown up with the routine, it wasn't hard for them to keep the fact that one of the Avengers (current lineup) was in their house. Their parents had frequently stressed how they were not to mention it at school, nor use their daddy's connections to impress their friends, and fortunately both of them were good enough kids to realize how serious it was and spent their time not in school or at soccer practice dancing attendance on Wanda and trying to raise her spirits.

Wanda didn't leave the farm herself, even when Clint strapped Nate into his car seat and went out for errands, since her face was, ironically, more well-known than his had ever been and she was much more likely to be recognized. The media focus on the Avengers was much higher after Ultron and Sokovia since the team had become an established, permanent thing only after that incident instead of a group of people who knew each other who just occasionally got together to handle international crime and terrorism. Most of the previous missions to mop up HYDRA had taken place in relatively backwater areas without a lot of people around but the ones shooting at them, which meant that overall there hadn't been much impact until the near-impact. And now with the news coverage of Lagos and the press conference footage making the rounds, it was more important than ever that she stay hidden. It didn't seem to bother her.

And that, in turn, bothered Clint. For five days he watched Wanda move around the farmhouse, clearly lost in her own thoughts as she folded laundry or strummed her fingers over her guitar's strings as she tried to remember the chords she'd learned. When someone engaged her, she was alert, gave responses, smiled if the children acted up, and she didn't shirk her part in house chores, helping care for Nate and once cooking dinner for all of them, a goulash that was the only thing they could make with the ingredients found in a small town in Iowa. But coming to the farm was supposed to restore her emotional balance, and while she wasn't collapsed in on herself, she wasn't moving forward from that either. 

Clint held her to his threat of training, rigging up some launchers to fire blunt arrows and other projectiles erratically, putting her in the center of them and having her use her powers to block or destroy them as well as work on her instinctive perception. He'd break off in the middle of conversations to challenge her to map the room around them with her eyes closed, testing her memory and ability to retain information. And though she didn't like it much, he dragged her along on his workout routine, running five miles every day and performing a series of stretches and martial arts routines to keep himself in shape, since he knew that her lack of physical conditioning was her biggest hurdle to superheroing at the moment. Nat and Steve called for updates but there wasn't much he could tell them, and not even Laura could do more than talk to the young woman, try to reassure her that she'd done all she could do. It seemed to stick, a little - but not nearly enough or in a way that would do much good. Everyone kept trying, for the people that had died in Lagos as well as Wanda herself, but it was like she'd lost her confidence in her abilities. She could do so much good in the world with them, but seeing how things could go wrong had made them horrible in her mind.

It was likely the timing of everything was affecting her as much as the actual explosion itself, because the anniversary of the fall of Sokovia and Pietro's death came while she was at the farm. Clint had made extra sure to get all of the family errands done so he could have the entire day clear to spend with her, knowing it wasn't going to be enough but wanting to do as much as he could for her anyway. Given the other circumstances that were also happening, Wanda didn't seem to be slipping further down into sadness as the day approached, but on the anniversary itself she was just as broken as she had been when Clint had come to the facility on Saturday. It was a rough day for him, too: he hadn't really known the twins, had spent less than a day in their company at that point, and had been attacked by Pietro twice in that time. But when the chips were down they'd come around, determined to fix what they'd done wrong, and Clint still had no idea what had driven Pietro to sacrifice himself to save him, the man he'd been antagonizing even just an hour before. But that sacrifice had allowed him to come home, to take his place with his family permanently, before he lost them for good. Nothing in the world could ever repay Wanda for what she'd lost so that Clint could gain, and all he could do was try to be her rock when she needed one. They spent most of the day on her bed, her clinging to him as she cried softly, his arm around her shoulders as they passed Nate back and forth between them. It seemed to help, at least a little, and Nate easily picked up on Wanda's distress. He spent most of the day trying to crawl into her lap and tug on her hair, asking for hugs and cuddles and leaving drool marks on her clothes. His son's insistence made her smile a little, and that was all Clint was hoping for. Anything else would have been a miracle.

In the end, they just didn't have enough time. Steve called late Wednesday night to say they needed her back on Friday, so Thursday was spent in the happiest, cheesiest manner Clint could come up with last-minute: a Disney marathon until the kids got home, then campfire cooking dinner around a fire pit he'd dug the year before and having a singalong under the stars. It worked, though, as Wanda was happier that night than she'd been since she'd arrived, laughing a few times and smiling at Cooper and Lila bickering and Nate trying to catch sparks as they danced through the sky. It was the best they could do, and at least she'd have a truly good memory from this visit instead of a pallor over everything.

After Cooper and Lila had gone to school and Laura was settled in for the day with Nate, Clint and Wanda boarded the Quin again and made the hour-and-a-half flight back to the Avengers compound. She talked more than she had on the way out, at least, so the trip hadn't been a total waste, but it still felt like he hadn't done nearly as much as he could to help her. Still, this was the life they'd signed up for, and duty called whether they were ready for it or not. 

Vision was waiting with Steve this time when they arrived, Nat being out on some business or other that she purposefully hadn't elaborated on when they'd talked the day before. Vision walked (god it was weird to see him walk instead of fly, and wasn't _that_ strange) to greet Wanda and escort her into the building while Steve stuck around, making small talk about Laura and the kids until they were out of earshot.

“Oh, here, Lila and Cooper wanted me to give these to you,” Clint said, holding out an envelope and a crayon drawing. Lila had drawn Steve himself in a reasonable approximation of Cap's suit, with Hawkeye next to him, Black Widow further down, and finishing with Scarlet Witch. Cooper had mostly outgrown the coloring stage and had written Steve a letter instead which he'd refused to let his dad look at before he sealed it up with a expression almost as nervous as when he'd blurted out in front of Wanda. Steve took the papers with a smile, shaking his head a little before looking back up to meet Clint's eyes and the smile fading.

“How's she doing?”

“Horrible.” There was no skating around it, and it wasn't like he was any good at it anyway. “She didn't really come out of herself all week unless we dragged her out. There's grieving but this isn't just that and I didn't have time to break her down and build her back up again. And everything that happened this time last year...” He exhaled heavily, shaking his head a little in frustration at his failure. “I know the Avengers are pretty much allergic to them, but I think she needs a therapist.”

Steve sighed, running a hand over his face, wincing minutely as he put pressure on the fading purple bruise along his jaw. Even accelerated healing couldn't immediately fix being thrown by an explosion from a fourth-floor balcony, and Clint wondered just how much rest Steve had been taking since Lagos. Even with his enhanced physique needing less than a normal human's, it probably wasn't enough.

“Maybe she's not the only one,” he continued when Steve didn't say anything in return. “Something happened out there other than you taking a dive onto a truck and nearly getting caught in a bomb.”

“We've got Sam,” Steve said, looking off at the horizon in a clear tell that he didn't want to talk about something major.

Clint rolled his eyes. “Yeah, and Sam's great, but he's also not acting as a counselor here. Maybe he should be and he just doesn't know it or maybe he doesn't know how to bring it up, or hell maybe since he's _on_ the team he doesn't feel like he can since he's too involved in it. I know Fury's got some S.H.I.E.L.D. psych staff stashed away somewhere, I can call and see if he can-”

“No.” Steve's voice was firm, emphatic without being loud but still sharp and commanding, and Clint abandoned that suggestion for the moment though he stored it away for later. When he spoke again, his voice was still firm, but back to normal speaking tones. “No, not Fury. I'm grateful for everything he's done, but we need to solve our own problems.”

“No one's solving this one though, and you're gonna need to do something about it.” Nat would speak plainly to Steve, but Nat wasn't there right now and Clint wasn't about to see his friend wear himself to shreds in front of him. It'd probably make Steve angry, but what were friends for? “That's why we had so many psych people with the agency, because they knew we'd screw ourselves up sometimes, get broken and need to be put back together. And yeah, maybe the Avengers aren't going out there and doing those 'actions of dubious morality' like we were or doing it as often, but shit's still going to happen and all that stuff piles up and-”

“Clint, please,” Steve groaned, shaking his head. “I get it, all right? You don't need to use the dad voice on me.”

“I've gotta practice it on someone for when my kids get to be teenagers. And that wasn't even _close_ to the dad voice, Rogers. Annoying head voice that you want to ignore but never shuts up maybe, but not the dad voice.” He paused to study Steve. The soldier was still looking out to the trees surrounding the compound, and even under the bruising it was easy for him to see a slight tensing in his muscles. Steve had amazing physical control of himself, better than Clint did unless he was fully locked into sniper-on-duty mode, but the cracks were starting to show. The new team had come together amazingly, learning to work together and utilize their abilities in coordinated efforts to complete their missions, but Lagos had been the first real failure in their history and Steve was handling it alone now. Nat helped as much as she could, but Captain America was the face of the team, the true leader, and no matter how good a duo they made she was still the spy and assassin with the morally dubious past who'd told the government to fuck off. He knew she liked that her public profile wasn't bigger than it was and regretted that it had to be even as big as that, but they both wished they could take some of the burden off Steve's shoulders. No matter how broad they were, they couldn't carry the entire world.

He'd do what he could for now, at least. “Come on, sit down for awhile. I don't have to be home until dinner.” Clint walked up the boarding ramp, thumbs stuck in the pocket of his jeans, waiting either for Steve to follow him or to tell him to back off and go home. After several seconds, a deep, almost resigned breath reached his ears, and even, heavy footsteps followed him into the Quin. Clint swung into the pilot's chair long enough to shut down every system in the complicated machine, turning it into nothing more than a very sophisticated, aerodynamic, and expensive metal box, before moving back to the chair he'd taken while flying in with Wanda. “I know you've got the world on your shoulders, but you're carrying too much, even for you. What's up?”

“You don't know when to take your nose out of it, do you Clint?”

“Nope. So you might as well go ahead and spill.”

Steve couldn't help a smile and a small head shake of amusement, crossing his arms as he leaned against the wall of the Quin. He was still looking out to the trees through the window, but the faint expression on his face told Clint that there wouldn't be a lot of stalling this time, thankfully. Glancing down, he adjusted his arms and hesitated just a moment longer before beginning. “It was when we caught up to Rumlow. He said something after I ripped his helmet off, and I...”

“You believed something that came out of that bastard's mouth? You're sure he wasn't just lying to you?”

“I don't know, maybe. But it felt...” Steve shook his head, glancing at the floor as he collected his thoughts. “It felt true. Most of it. Probably not the part where he set off the bomb, the timing doesn't add up. But the stuff before it felt right. He mentioned Bucky.”

“...Bucky-Bucky? James Buchanan Barnes-Bucky, Winter Soldier-Bucky?”

“Yeah. He said that he remembered me.”

He'd been too busy not getting his ass killed in Mexico to pay close attention when most of that fiasco had been going on, but Nat had filled him in as soon as they'd rendezvoused afterwards. Steve's best friend, lost during the war and the only casualty of the Howling Commandos, posthumous recipient of the Medal of Honor for his voluntary actions in that team. From everything Steve had said, he'd been a good guy, a loyal friend, and maybe a bit of a shit-stirrer, which was something Clint liked. The stories he'd been told reminded him of him and Nat, actually. The Winter Soldier turning up in 2014 in Washington DC to kill Nick Fury wasn't something anyone had expected, especially considering most people didn't even believe he was real (Clint was not among those – he'd helped Nat recover after being shot in Odessa), and even less did anyone expect the Winter Soldier and James Buchanan Barnes to be the same person. With Steve's testimony about rescuing him and his fellow POWs from Italy it was obvious to everyone that he'd had something done to him that was similar to Steve's serum. The files HYDRA had kept made it even more obvious that further experiments had been performed on him and his entire brain had been rewritten as he was thawed and refrozen for missions, but that didn't change the fact that Barnes seemed to be completely gone and the Winter Soldier was all that was left. Only one thing put that decision in doubt: he'd pulled Steve from the river after the Project Insight helicarrier they were fighting in had crashed, when there had been no reason to do so and his last 'mission' would have been completed.

And now there was another piece of evidence that he was coming back to himself.

“What'd he say?”

“That was mostly it. The rest of it...” Steve grimaced a little and shook his head, looking back to Clint for the first time since entering the Quin. “That's the part that doesn't make sense. He said that Bucky told him to tell me something, that when you've got to go, you've got to go. But that was when the trigger came out and he pushed the button and he continued with 'and I'm taking you with me.'”

“Which meant he was probably stalling.” Clint wasn't a genius like Stark or Banner, but thanks to S.H.I.E.L.D. and his own talents he had a way of putting together information into a comprehensive picture that was oftentimes better than the people he was working with. Fury still made the occasional joke about how the head of the security detail at Project PEGASUS had realized what was going on with the Tesseract before the scientists did, along with mentioning more than once that the uncanny perception was Clint's superpower. Maybe it was if you took it by loose definition, but it still didn't make him a match for anyone with physical powers or the technology to match those. “Keeping you off-balance until he could arm the bomb or work out the trigger from wherever he was keeping it so it didn't go off on accident.”

“Right, that fight we had would've set it off before then if he was holding it himself, since he kept trying to punch me.”

“Exactly. And he knew you'd only hesitate if he could take you by surprise, and – face it, Steve, you've got a thing with losing friends. That's the easiest way to distract you.” The look Steve flashed his way was accusing, possibly borderline murderous, but Clint just snorted and rolled his eyes, refusing to take it back. “Don't give me that, you know it's true. And it's not like it's a big surprise why, since you didn't have a lot of friends before the serum and then you were frozen in Greenland for decades and-”

“Drop it, Clint.”

The order got his driest, most sarcastic look in return. “You're not my boss anymore, Rogers. But you're my friend, and whatever else's going on, you're not looking to take care of yourself like you should, so sometimes the rest of us have to beat some sense into that super strong skull of yours even if you don't want it.” Steve looked back out the window, jaw clenched again, the tension in his muscles evident, and Clint decided to dial it back a notch even if he didn't drop the subject. “You think I don't know what that's like? You've seen me and Nat in the field, you know I've got a family I'm so paranoid about getting hurt because of my line of work that the number of colleagues who knew about them could be counted on one hand and have fingers left over when you're done. Me and Nat have a pact that if one of us goes off the deep end, the other one ends it. No questions. I thought it was really gonna happen on the helicarrier, and it still would've been a hell of a lot better than living as Loki's minion.”

A little bit of the tension bled out of Steve's arms and shoulders, his jaw relaxing just a little. “She saved you, though.”

“Just like Barnes saved you.” The parallels weren't a lot, but they were there, and Clint grabbed onto them with both hands to make his point. “Both of us were in hopeless situations where we either were dying or death was the preferable option. Nat got me out of it when she had no reason to think she'd be able to do it and Barnes pulled you out of the river when he'd been beating the shit out of you before that. Which means that Rumlow was making it up, but he was probably telling the truth about some things even if he didn't know it. Me and Nat are known in all the espionage circles but the Winter Soldier was so good most people didn't think he was real until the HYDRA files came out. He'd just appear, do his job, and vanish without a trace, and there'd be a car wreck or an explosion or sometimes a real assassination that'd always be attributed to someone actually in the game. So him pulling you out when he's done all that means he wanted to save you.”

There were several seconds of silence as Steve continued to stare out the window, his arms slowly losing their rigidity and falling back down to his sides. Eventually he took a deep breath and Clint could see him physically let go of the anger his needling had provoked, and he took a couple of steps sideways to sink into one of the other passenger chairs. “I know. I've known since DC, really, but it's still hard to believe. If he was starting to remember, why didn't he stick around? Or why didn't he come back? Sam and I've been looking for him whenever we're not doing Avengers work since then, but we've found nothing.”

It was definitely unintentional, but the words hit Clint like a knife to the heart, throwing him back four years into the aftermath of the Battle of New York and coming out of the trance Loki had put him in, that for all his training he'd been powerless to fight against. There had been fields of blue everywhere around him and a sense of such _peace_ that it was impossible to even want to fight against it, and so he hadn't. He hadn't protested at being ordered to shoot Fury, the man who'd found him working a run-of-the-mill construction job and pulled him back into combat after he'd thought the opportunity was lost to him forever. He hadn't hesitated to spill Natasha's entire history to his new “employer” as part of the frost giant's efforts to subvert her, listing every single action she'd taken under both the Red Room and S.H.I.E.L.D. and the innocent lives that had been lost. He'd willingly gathered enemies of S.H.I.E.L.D. to lead them in a raid against the helicarrier, resulting in over twenty agents dead when he'd blown the engine to pieces and the mercenaries had poured in, and almost all the others on board injured. Coulson... that one still hurt more than anything. 

The only time that absolute control had fallen away even a little bit was when Loki had realized there was one small portion of Clint's mind that was still fenced away and had tried to dig deeper – and while it had been painful, more painful than anything he could ever remember, because the giant had set all his body's pain receptors on fire from the inside of his brain in order to get him to talk, Clint had never spilled the location of his family. There was that one small nugget of _himself_ left in there beyond all the clouds Loki had cast around him, the one that kept him protecting the people most important to him. Saving his family, shooting Fury in the bulletproof vest he wore instead of the head, missing every time he took a shot at Hill, and when Nat had cornered him in the helicarrier, pulling his punches just hard enough that she was able to take him down in a minute. It wasn't even close to being a rebellion, but just enough of him had survived to be able to give others openings to reach out to him.

Had Barnes even had that much of himself left? After going what he went through for seventy years?

“You really wanna know why?” Steve focused on him again, surprise easily evident in his eyes, and all right, Clint hadn't been prepared for how rough his voice became there. Four years, a career as a superhero, and a third kid later, and he still woke up with nightmares about those days, about what could have happened, about what _did_ happen. “Because I can tell you why, Steve. It's the same fucking thing that happened to me after Loki. Didn't Nat ever tell you?”

“She mentioned you were put in isolation, to make sure you were safe again, but-” His eyes widened, and Clint was sure he knew what thought had occurred to him. “You went to the farm?”

“There was no fucking way in hell I was going there in the shape I was in. I wasn't about to risk my family around me, and Nat wasn't either. But S.H.I.E.L.D.'s run up against brainwashing before, so there's a policy in place – isolation for a month, rounds of psych evals, brain scans, everything you can think of. I packed it away for the fight so I could get revenge, but once Thor took him away I broke. Nat took me back to the headquarters you woke up in and threw me in a holding cell. Half the people in the agency wanted to at least take a shot at me and the only reason I wasn't executed is because Fury and a few others that made it out of the lab saw what happened and knew I had no choice in it. I didn't want to go home when I got out, Steve, I was dangerous and I didn't know if it'd come back. No one knew if it would since it was alien magic and not something from earth. I could just be walking down the street some day and all of a sudden that blue'd pass over my eyes and I'd reach out and break the neck of the person in front of me, and maybe I don't have superpowers but I'm still one of the deadliest people on this planet. I'm licensed as a demolitions expert and I can build two-ton explosives out of components from the hardware store, I can steal any sort of vehicle short of a full-sized submarine, there's caches of weapons and IDs and money hidden all around the world I still haven't taken down, and I'm almost as good at disappearing into the wind as the Winter Soldier was. If I'd lost control of myself again, depending on the orders I was given, a _lot_ of people would've wound up dead, and I doubt anyone would've caught me for a long time.”

“Clint-”

“No, you're gonna let me finish.” He matched Steve's gaze with his own, dropping just a bit of his shields to show him how much that loss of control _still_ hurt him, how he still doubted himself sometimes. Steve blinked, taken aback, but didn't look away. “I didn't want to go back home after I got out. I didn't know if I'd snap and hurt them and not be able to stop myself. I couldn't _touch_ my wife for two months. I thought she was going to pick up the kids and walk out on me for a _year_. When Thor came back and told us that Loki was dead, I broke down sobbing in relief. And all that was only because of four days. Barnes went through _seven decades_ of being pulled out of storage whenever he was needed, wiped clean, sent out to kill someone or steal something, and then being put on ice again. He's afraid, Steve. Afraid of what he could do. He's afraid to think about what he _has_ done. I don't know if he remembers what he's been used for or not, but if he's waking up he knows the world isn't the same as it was when he was lost, and he has all these skills now that even a trained army sniper wouldn't have. He doesn't want to put you at risk, or probably anyone else. And if his memories are coming back, they could be hurting him. And he's probably afraid of losing them again. We keep thinking we've finished HYDRA, but there has to still be a few out there laying low, and if even one of them finds him...”

“He could lose all he's gotten back, however much that is.” Steve sighed, sitting back in the chair and raising a hand to rub his face. “There's probably not a lot I could do to find him, is there.”

Clint shook his head, leaning forward to brace his arms on his knees. “Short of having a shot of blind luck? Not really. No one's put out his image much, and all the pictures I ever saw of him were the shots of him with you and the Howling Commandos back in the war or wearing that whole getup where you can't even see his face. The 'Winter Soldier' was talked about on the news some when you took down HYDRA, but that pretty much died when he never turned up after that and there hasn't been any mysterious deaths that can be linked to his methods. I don't even know if Fury bothered to look for him, knowing what you knew.”

“He said he was going to Europe to track down all the HYDRA rats that didn't go down with the ship. Presumably he was feeding intel to Hill, who put it into Tony's system, and-”

“And we'd go take down the big nests while Fury and whoever else stuck with him or didn't end up in jail for awhile eliminated the little guys. Good tactics, kept them focused on a full-scale assault from us and not from solo operatives who could sneak in and disable them.”

“Yeah. But if they weren't causing trouble or had something that obviously shouldn't have been there, would he have found them?”

He gave a careless shrug. “Sometimes the paper trail will lead you to them, sometimes it won't. It's more than my professional reputation to say it, but sometimes if they're just leading their own lives, no matter what they'd done? I'd leave 'em alone. Keep tabs on them to see if they backslid, but there's always bigger fish to chase.”

“And if they hadn't wanted to do it in the first place...” With another sigh, Steve shook his head and leaned back in his seat, staring at the ceiling. “It was hard enough for me waking up with the world so different but so similar. What it must be like for him...”

“You're the only one who knows what it's like, Steve.” Clint leaned forward a little and reached out, clapping his hand on the soldier's shoulder, and the sudden contact made him look up and meet his gaze again. “You've got the best chance of helping him, if he wants to be helped. Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't, I don't know, I never met the guy. But from what you've said I think I'd like him. We can always use someone around to get you to stop having so much of a stick up your ass.”

Steve snorted with involuntary laughter, grinning and pushing Clint's hand away and shaking his head. “I'm not _that_ bad. I'm not! Am I?”

“Sometimes you are. Sometimes you really, _really_ are,” Clint replied, grinning himself. Both of them chuckled for a moment, the atmosphere lightening up as they relaxed, and he let several seconds pass before speaking again. “But you're also the guy we can all count on, who's always trying to do the right thing and won't let his friends down. You've got the strength and the speed and everything, but you can also get people to listen to you and believe in you and what you're doing. And you know when to make the tough calls and when to trust in the people around you. That's why we follow you, you know. Being this great symbol of the country, who cares, that's nothing compared to what you can do just on your own.”

“I- uh, that- you-” Clint barely bit back a snicker and couldn't help the grin at the _stammering_ Steve suddenly devolved into and the faint blush that was spreading up his neck and onto his ears; the man could _not_ easily handle any form of compliment on a personal level, which made it more fun than it should have been to toss some at him from time to time. Tony generally took them as his due, Steve let them drop through his fingers. Even now as he got his tongue back under control, Steve gave him a small glare that was completely negated by the tugging at the corners of his mouth, exposing the smile he was hiding. “Thanks, Clint. That was completely unnecessary, but thanks.”

“Nope, necessary. Sometimes you need reminding of it.”

“Unnecessary. But it's getting close to noon, do you want to go inside, get something to eat?”

“Nah, think I'll pass,” Clint said, standing up and stretching his arms over his head; Steve instinctively stood as he did. “Laura had a list of errands she wanted to get done; if I get back now, I should be able to take care of them all before dinner tonight. And I want to start laying out the plans for that game room and extra bedrooms since you guys are turning up more often now.”

Steve didn't hide the grin this time. “You know, one day Laura's going to take away your drafting paper. You keep saying you're done with the house-”

“-But then we took in a bunch of superheroes, and a bunch of superheroes need beds to sleep in when they camp out with us. Speaking of that, Nate's first birthday's in a couple of weeks – you guys are welcome to come out and spend the weekend with us, give me some help laying the foundation and pouring concrete. No world-saving, just getting your hands dirty at good, honest work.” He reached over to hit the general power button once again, waking the ship up once again.

“I'll mention it to the team.” Steve chuckled and held out his hand, and Clint clapped it with his, giving a firm shake as the lights blinked on around them and the engines briefly whined as it engaged and then went into “sleep” mode until they were actually needed. “We'll have to see what things are like then, but getting away for a day or so shouldn't be too hard.”

“And it's not that far by Quin in case something does go wrong,” Clint agreed, looking around him to make sure all the indicators were properly lit. “Seriously, consider my suggestion. I know there's a lot that's hard for our set to talk about, but the job's not gonna get any easier.”

“I will. Thanks, Clint. And thank your kids for these,” he said, waving the papers he still held a little to show what he was talking about. Steve turned and headed down the open bay door, but paused a few feet from the end to turn back and squint back at him. “Hey, Clint? How'd you get through it?”

Clint gave another shrug, raising a hand to scratch the nape of his neck. “The psychiatrists did their job. It took a long time, a lot longer than I wanted it to, but everything they said started sticking. I had a few good days, then I had more, more after that, so on and so on and everything. And when I didn't lose control again... I started believing I wasn't going to, that it couldn't happen without the staff actually touching me. I mean, at that point I thought it was locked in the Fridge, not in some HYDRA base in Europe, so I was as safe as anyone else could be. The kids didn't really understand, Lila was only three and Cooper six, but Laura and Nat? They saved me. When I had bad days on the farm or in the field, they were there for me. Fury stuck with me, too, whenever he could. The people who wanted to see me back... they got me back. They worked their asses off to do it and I'm never gonna be able to pay them back for it.”

“But they did it.”

“Yeah, they did it.” He hesitated for a moment, then took a couple of steps down the ramp, making sure to catch Steve's eye as he moved. “I'm not saying don't look for Barnes. But if you find him, be careful. You're not gonna know what state he's in or how much he remembers, so don't run up to him like a little kid. Take it slow and track the breeze before jumping into anything, or something might happen that none of us want.”

“He's my friend, Clint.”

“Barnes is your friend. The Winter Soldier? He's no one's friend. We don't know how much he is of the first compared to the second and we can't afford to lose you. Be careful, got it?”

His lips pressed into a thinner line but Steve nodded, accepting for the moment at least that Clint had a point, and turned back to finish debarking from the Quin. Clint slapped the release lever and the door began to close once Steve was off, and he strode back to the pilot's chair to finish the power-up sequence. Tony had streamlined all of that to take no more than thirty seconds so that the team could be in the air as soon as possible on an emergency call, and Clint was in the air less than a minute after Steve's boots hit the concrete of the landing pad. Glancing down, he saw Steve was still at the edge of the tarmac, watching him lift off; straight in front of him, he spied two figures standing at a window on the sixth floor in the living quarters, definitely Wanda and Vision looking on. As he throttled up the engines he pulled the controls into a tight spin, making two circles above the roof of the compound as a kind of goodbye wave before turning the Quin southwest.

The flight back was as boring as a flight in a Quinjet ever was, and three and a half hours after he'd left he pulled back into the “hangar” in the trees. With Cooper and Lila both in school, there was no one waiting for him this time, and the walk back to the house was much quieter than it had been when he'd arrived with Wanda. Making sure to leave his boots outside the house, he stepped into the kitchen and was confused when he didn't see Laura or Nate anywhere. “Anybody here?”

On the counter, a crackle of static alerted him to the baby monitor activating. It was a cheap model they just hadn't gotten rid of after Lila had gotten too old to need it, so the words weren't exactly intelligible as the fuzz turned everything into a double-layered robot voice fed through a wool blanket, but it worked well enough for him to tell that Laura was in the nursery, probably putting Nate down for a nap. Grabbing the monitor, he pulled his jacket off and hung it on the coat tree as he started climbing the stairs, going quietly to not disturb the baby. 

Sure enough, when he reached the doorway, Laura was sitting in the rocking chair, cradling Nate against her chest as he slept with his head turned to the side and one hand clutching a loop of her long hair, nestled between her collarbone and shoulder. Clint couldn't help but smile at the picture; it was like something out of a movie or a magazine, something that was just too perfect to exist in the real world. He distrusted perfection on instinct, but there was no way he could resist the image in front of him. 

“Hey,” he whispered, crossing the room on socked feet to kiss Laura briefly and then gently press his lips to the crown of Nate's head, “did he just go down?”

“About ten minutes ago. I should be able to put him in his crib soon.” For some reason neither of them could figure out, their latest child had a particular routine that had to happen every time he fell asleep: ten minutes of holding, either of rocking in the chair or being softly jiggled as the holder walked, before he would stay asleep in his crib. It was at least less stressful than Lila's babyhood habit of sleeping for twenty minutes and then wailing to announce she'd woken up before going to sleep for real, and with their third child they were used to adapting by now. “How'd it go?”

“Dropped her off, talked to Steve. I told him he should think about getting a psychiatrist on staff, but I don't know how much he's gonna listen to that.”

“He's a grown man, it's up to him and the rest of the team to decide what to do.” Laura still sighed a little as she looked down at Nate, judging how ready he was for the crib. “I wish we could've done more for her while she was here.”

“We did the best we could. _You_ did the best you could. You're amazing, and no one can say otherwise,” Clint said, leaning down to kiss her again.

He could feel her lips curl into a smile beneath his as she kissed him back. “Well if I did everything I could do, so did you. No more doubting yourself, okay? You still have a place on that team, even if you're not fighting alongside them anymore.”

He smiled. “Yes, ma'am. Think it's time?”

“Yeah, that should be good.” Clint stood back as Laura pushed herself up from the rocker, cradling Nate against her as she carried him over to the crib. He gently removed his son's hand from her hair as she lowered him in, making sure he was settled more or less comfortably (he definitely got his tendency to sprawl everywhere from his father) and drawing a blanket over him to keep him warm. He slid his arm around her shoulders and she leaned into his side as they stood there for another few moments, watching their baby sleep.

“I told Steve about your invitation to come out for his birthday.”

“Did he say yes?”

“Said they'll try. That's about the best you can do with people who save the world.”

“I remember.” When he looked down at Laura, she was smiling at him, her eyes warm and welcoming, her hair brushing over his hand in soft waves. If he concentrated, he could smell the floral scent of her shampoo. “The world needs taking care of. But they can always come back here when they need to.”

Clint didn't even try to stop the grin that spread over his face. “You're amazing, you know that?”

“So are you,” she responded, rising up on her feet a little to capture his lips with hers. 

He forgot he was holding the baby monitor in one hand as he wrapped his arms around her waist, her own arms looping around his neck and one hand winding in the short hairs of his nape. He even forgot he was standing next to the crib where his son was quietly sleeping because Laura was kissing him in the way she'd long ago discovered made him happiest (in both respects), putting her full body into it and leaning half her weight on him. It took several seconds for him to gather enough of his brain back together to pull away, though he only went far enough to meet her eyes. “Late lunch today?”

“Sometimes you're not entirely hopeless at romance, Hawkeye. Don't forget the monitor.”

And, once more, he grinned. “Yes, ma'am.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _I will go down with this ship, I won't put my hands up and surrender~_
> 
>  
> 
> Yeah, in case you couldn't tell, I adore Clint/Laura and their children and make no apologies for it. It's so wonderful to see a positive representation of family in a giant blockbuster series and of a couple who has clearly gone through a lot together, weathered the tough storms and managed to pull through it all. We need more of that in our media; almost all shows and most movies produced either ignore it entirely in favor of _drama_ and keeping viewers "hooked" or just don't focus on it even in times when it would be called for. Sure the early passion in a relationship is great, but so is having that love and intrinsic understanding of another person that you can honestly call your other half. There will be more of them in the future, most definitely.
> 
> Now for some trivia!  
> -A friend of mine and I agreed that Clint would love most rock music up through the overblown hair metal era of the late 80s and we both love Bon Jovi, so that became Clint's ringtone.  
> -Another friend of mine calls her son "Bug" and I thought it was cute, so I used it for Clint and Nate. I originally went to type "Buddy" but remembered Clint uses that for Cooper, and I like the idea of all the kids having their own little pet names.  
> -I based Cooper and Lila _very_ loosely on the children of a coworker of mine, in that I borrowed a few of their major personality traits and then went in my own direction. They're roughly the same ages and both very sweet kids and I adore them.  
>  -I have _no_ idea where Cooper having a precocious crush on Wanda came from but it made me giggle like crazy, so it stayed in.  
>  -Coop hero worships Cap. Lila prefers Thor and Auntie Nat. It remains to be seen who Nate will love most but a lot of people are taking bets on Sam.
> 
> I'll see you all next time!


	3. Part Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> MORE WORDS! THERE ARE EVEN MORE WORDS! I have no idea how long this is gonna be, but you better believe it's going to break 100k before it's done.
> 
> Anyway, thank you for returning! Thank you for all the kudos, bookmarks, and to Snow, Cerusee, and drlense for leaving very nice comments :) I know this isn't the biggest corner of the fandom, but knowing that someone is reading and enjoying this makes me want to write more, and better. Never stop improving!
> 
> I hope everyone enjoys this chapter, and I should be back once again next Tuesday with the fourth part. Musical accompaniment for part three here is "Handclap" by Fitz and the Tantrums and "High Dive" by Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness. Now, time to sit back and read!

After being a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent for fifteen years, Clint was confident that planning a family vacation would be a piece of cake. How could arranging a leisurely week of fun for two adults and three children with almost no schedule except what they set for themselves be difficult after dealing with coordinating groups of anywhere from three to twenty agents for operations that required split second timing in order for everyone not to end up badly injured or dead? There would be no weapons involved, no covert information drops, no breaking and entering, no targets to locate. All they had to do was load up the car and go, then spend six days relaxing next to a giant, picturesque lake where they could swim or ski or hike the nature trails around the lodge.

Oh how wrong he was. 

It wasn't that they hadn't had any family vacations before, but given his career they'd often been interrupted, last-minute, or completely canceled, for him anyway. Laura had always dealt with arranging those trips since it was impossible for him to explain why a dedicated agent with no family was booking hotel rooms for places like Busch Gardens, and more than half the time they'd had something planned he'd ended up being called in to work no matter how much he'd stressed to Fury that he wanted that time off. Being fair, Fury never called him in unless it really was an emergency, but since that was most of what S.H.I.E.L.D. and especially he had dealt with, there turned out to be a lot of unexpected call-ins. It was just for the best that Laura handled the vacation arrangements with the hope that he'd be able to make it and continued forward with it anyway if he wasn't. But now that he was retired, Clint felt like he should set this one up since she'd had to do it all on her own so many times before, with his only contributions being suggesting places to go.

Somehow it had completely slipped his highly-trained thought process that even though ops had a lot more specific minutiae to plan right down to the wire, that very level of high training made it a lot easier to organize almost anything within S.H.I.E.L.D.'s purview that wasn't a total disaster (and even then ninety-nine percent of the time they had contingency plans in place and ready to run). There were standard routines in place for all types of missions which could be modified depending on the situation and the participating agents but gave everyone the same basic grounding and expectations at the start. Agents also didn't argue with each other for selfish reasons – the few times they persisted in that habit beyond what their supervisors were willing to put up with, they wound up riding a low-level desk jockey position, sometimes within hours. Questions could be asked, flaws in the planning could be challenged, but demands for glory weren't tolerated. They were also good at packing light and being ready to run on a moment's notice, with or without having eaten. He'd had personal experience with that last bit not being true with his children, so he was prepared for that at least: Lila was developing into a little clotheshorse and always wanted to have as much variation as possible in her wardrobe, while Cooper would constantly want to pick up souvenirs of wherever they'd gone and so would leave with twice what he brought. All of that was expected. What he wasn't prepared for was how hard he'd have to fight everything else off.

Possibly the only easy decision had been where to go, as Big Cedar Lodge was close enough and had enough activity and acreage around it to keep everyone entertained between the lake itself, the forest around it, and assorted museums. But then came the debate about what kind of lodging to book, a full cabin, a cottage, or a room, made more complicated by the fact that they had an energetic one-year-old to deal with and that Cooper and Lila immediately started arguing about sharing a room and both of them not wanting to sleep on a pull-out couch. Since he was still being “paid” by Tony money wasn't a problem, but Clint had grown up with nothing and had early on gotten into a habit of frugality that he found difficult to drop, which meant he didn't want to spend money on more room than they needed for what was supposed to be a simple vacation. But after a week of his two older children bickering back and forth about “staying out of my space,” he put his foot down and reserved one of the family cabins just to call it done. Laura looked on with an amused smile as he tried to field the arguments, and he could only tell himself what an idiot he was for _asking out loud_ how hard could this be. Murphy's law had clearly struck and he would only be able to suffer through it, given that he'd brought it on himself.

Then there were the constant debates about what to do when they got there, since some of the activities had to be pre-booked and the kids had different ideas about what to do with their time, Cooper wanting to spend it mostly with the trees and Lila in the water. That one he eventually just tuned them out on and set up a couple of the lessons and tours at times that seemed reasonable, spaced a little apart, leaving the rest of the days open so as to not make it feel like an army schedule. The weirder and more disturbing aspect of that came when Cooper, lurking on the lodge's website, discovered they offered bowfishing and immediately started to convince his father to try it. It took Clint several hours to argue his son down from that one; Cooper himself was far too young to do it by the lodge's posted rules, and Clint _couldn't_ do it because his own skills were almost unnatural. It wouldn't _quite_ be a dead giveaway that he was Hawkeye the Avenger if he started nailing every fish in the lake through the eye with an arrow, but it would turn a lot more heads than he wanted to and someone would figure it out sooner rather than later. For some reason, though, Cooper was more resistant to this argument than usual, and some of the things he said made Clint wonder if he actually wanted his father to be outed.

When the kids were told they'd be going on the vacation, about a week after Wanda left and Clint and Laura had both made sure their schedules were clear, Lila had immediately started trying to pack for the trip without comprehending that they wouldn't even be leaving for just over a month. Not a day passed in which she failed to beg her parents to buy some new toy to bring with them as they were shopping or one of them having to go into her room and literally dump out the box she'd started filling with clothes she wanted to bring with her, crumpled into little balls to fit as much in as possible, after which she'd start protesting that she _needed_ all those things and had to be _sure_ they came with her and why couldn't they leave _now_ she wanted to go swimming! Cooper didn't turn into a hoarder like his sister, but he scoured the websites and the list of activities available there and started planning detailed schedules for the entire family – mostly based on what he wanted to do, of course. Normally his studiousness pleased his parents, but occasionally Clint and Laura got exasperated with it and this was definitely one of those times, especially since Lila was getting to be good enough at reading to actually figure out what he was planning – and how little of it involved her opinions. 

“Is it like this every time?” Clint asked one night as yet another loud squabble broke out between their older children, Lila shouting at her brother that he was being a selfish meanie and Cooper yelling back that she was a stupid baby and only wanted to do things her own way, with both of their raised voices setting Nate off into loud squalls as he pounded on his high chair with his little fists and kicked his legs just to add to the din.

Even with all the noise, Laura had to smile at the weariness on her husband's face. “No, but they're getting to be that age where they'll be butting heads a lot more often. It happened with me and my sister, too. I'll break the fight up, you take Nate.”

“Yes, ma'am,” he said, grateful to just be dealing with the child who still only had reactions instead of actions, lifting him from the chair and taking him out for a walk around the porch as Laura swooped in to silence the older two.

Even driving there required a detour, because Laura had expressed a wish to travel through Schuyler County to visit the courthouse where they'd been married (and that he'd broken into that night to steal their paperwork so Fury could bury it and keep her safe). There was no way in hell that Clint could refuse her such a simple request and it was more or less on the way, so it got added to the itinerary. He just hoped the kids wouldn't find it too boring or sappy and thus complain about it the entire way there.

Getting the kids through the last couple of weeks of school provided some needed distraction for them, with Cooper finishing fourth grade and Lila completing first. End-of-the-year parties at school and at a couple of their friends' homes took their attention as they helped prepare cookies and brownies to take to the get-togethers, and Clint spent more time around other parents as a parent than he ever had before. He'd met some of them in the past when he happened to be home and Laura dragged him to PTA meetings, but the unpredictable nature of his work schedule meant he'd rarely spent much time around them beyond a friendly nod. To them he was Clint Mackay, a privately contracted pilot working for an incredibly finicky boss that had made him sign an NDA to end all NDAs, which explained why he was gone for roughly half the year and left his family on their own at the farm. Now that he was retired and around twenty-four-seven, a lot of those parents were trying to weasel clues to his “former” employer's identity out of him in search of gossip for the grist mill. Clint being gone a lot was a long-standing fact of life in their small town since they'd moved there when they'd gotten married fifteen years before, but having constant access to him made some of the residents bolder, as if they could wear him down over time to learn what he was hiding. By this point he'd had a lot of practice at sidestepping questions and managing to not answer what he chose while still giving the impression that they'd learned something, so the overly curious walked away with a feeling of satisfaction and he could breathe easier for a little bit until the next group of “interested parties” showed up. Even after Natasha had dumped all the S.H.I.E.L.D. files online, so many of them were still encrypted that their little backwater, which was just starting to catch up to the levels of tech he was used to in the agency over ten years ago, had absolutely no idea who he was and where he'd really disappeared to all those times he'd left the farm. And he was determined to keep it that way.

The other distraction came a week before school ended for the kids as a second Quinjet landed in the yard on Friday, scooting under the trees as much as possible before spilling Nat, Steve, and Sam into the field. Nate had been born just over three weeks after Sokovia and almost a month early, scaring his parents nearly out of their minds when Laura unexpectedly went into labor, but he'd come into the world a happy, healthy baby and didn't seem to have any of the problems that preemies frequently did. A year later, he was bigger and more physically (and apparently mentally) developed than other babies his age that hadn't been born prematurely, and that seemed like a pretty good reason to celebrate to his parents. The whole family had gone out to meet the arrivals as the second Quin was parked, Cooper and Lila jumping on Steve and Nat as soon as they'd walked down the ramp, with Clint basically dropping Nate in Sam's arms upon seeing him with a grin.

“What, you're just giving your children away now, Clint?” Sam asked with a chuckle as he adjusted his hold on the squirming child that was reaching for his sunglasses. He didn't have the opportunity to be around kids much, but his compassionate and patient nature meant he was surprisingly good with them, and all three Barton children liked him almost as much as Steve. 

“Figured you could use a mascot, and he's already used to being a bird. Had a little costume back at Halloween and everything.” Clint reached to shake the hand Sam held out to him around Nate's feet, keeping half an eye on the others to make sure one of the kids didn't try and hide in the Quin. “Go ahead, we'll bring everything up to the house.”

“We didn't bring much – couple of small bags, my flightpack. Tony made some upgrades this week that I want to try out more before using them in the field.”

“ _You're_ bringing that then, Sam,” Laura said, having moved close enough after greeting Steve and Nat to hear Sam's words. She easily took Nate from him, pulling the sunglasses from his hands as she did and tucking them into Sam's shirt pocket. “I don't want that anywhere away from you this weekend unless it's in the closet – Cooper's really starting to get into taking things apart, and we're not paying to replace it.”

Sam nodded, grinning at Laura's insistence. “Noted. And fair. I don't think he could get into it without a lot of specialized equipment, but knowing his father...”

“Don't remind me! He still hasn't cleaned the bathroom up from its latest remodeling and he promised you'd help him clean out the barn this weekend. I'm expecting you to hold him to that promise, Sam!” she called over her shoulder as she carried Nate back to the house.

Sam turned a singularly sardonic look on Clint, folding his arms over his chest.

Clint grinned sheepishly and gave a half-shrug. “I didn't want you guys to be bored?”

“I thought the whole point of coming out here was to be bored. Relax, enjoy the quiet life. Something in that idea change, Barton?” Steve asked, walking over with Lila hanging giggling off his shoulders and taking no apparent notice of it.

“ _Your friend_ here volunteered us for manual labor. _Without_ telling us.”

“Hey now, I warned you when I dropped Wanda off!” Clint broke in before Sam could really get going.

“Maybe you told him, but you didn't tell the rest of us!”

“Better get used to it, Wilson.” Natasha walked over, arm around Cooper's shoulders and bag in her other hand, which she threw at Clint with a smile and a good deal of force. He, in turn, caught it and stuck out his tongue at her. “Clint's still got too much S.H.I.E.L.D. in him to not put every resource he has to use. You come here, you're gonna be on a work crew. Right, buddy?” she asked, looking down at Cooper.

Cooper, for his part, didn't seem to realize what the problem was. “It's fun to help Dad. Don't you want to?”

“Yeah, it's fun! Daddy's gonna teach me how to use a saw soon!” Lila chimed in from over Steve's shoulder, scrambling up to get into proper piggyback position and forcing the soldier to grab her leg to keep her from falling off all together. “He says I can't do it alone because I might cut myself and bleed and I don't wanna bleed but I wanna help and you can help us too!”

Sam glanced between the children, and Steve and Natasha with smiles on both their faces and obviously about two seconds away from laughing, before looking back at Clint. “You set this up, didn't you. You've got these kids trained. Do we all get a treat now or something?” 

“Yeah, dinner.” Clint grinned, clapping his hand on Sam's shoulder before making his way into the Quin. “Come on Sam, let's get the rest of your stuff and get in there. We're having meatloaf and mashed potatoes tonight.”

“Meatloaf and mashed potatoes. Man, you're so stereotypically American it's creepy, you know that?”

“Whatever, it's good!”

Getting everyone into the house didn't take very long after that, though Clint ended up loaded down with most of the baggage except Sam's Falcon suit as the kids continued to cling to Steve and Nat. Natasha had her own room at the house with her status as “family” and the few things she'd brought with her were dropped there without preamble while Steve and Sam would be occupying the guest room. Clint left it up to them which of them was going to be more self-sacrificing and insist the other have the bed while he took the army cot that had been set up; he knew both of them well enough to know they'd put the other's comfort before their own. It was a stupid thing to debate and so he wasn't going to get in the middle of it, but before anything else was unpacked or set up, he hauled Sam down to the basement of the house and the room that Laura had long ago deemed “the closet.” It had been one of his earliest renovations to the house, way back before they'd seriously considered having children, when the reality of his new work situation was completely sinking in and he realized he wanted to be prepared for any eventuality – including that this home would one day be discovered, no matter how careful he and Fury had been to hide it. He kept his favorite bow and two quivers of arrows (one regular, one trick) and a spare tactical suit in a shallow alcove in the master bedroom closet behind a false wall, but the majority of his “at home” equipment was loaded into what had originally been a root cellar back when the farm was still a working one. He'd lined it with concrete and then with steel, calling in a favor from Fury to get the S.H.I.E.L.D.-grade stuff and some help from him and Laura in putting it up, then wired an electronic lock into the door and hid the keypad several feet away under an old laundry sink where it wouldn't attract any attention, and _then_ barricaded the whole thing behind old wooden crates and other junk bolted to the wall and door in order to disguise its significance. After Nat had begun spending more of her own time at the farm, sometimes even when Clint wasn't there, a lot of her spare equipment had moved in right alongside his, which made the closet a veritable treasure trove of bows, arrows, guns, ammunition, lock picks, electronic equipment, various forms of falsified IDs, kevlar-lined tac suits, stun weapons, and explosives. Needless to say the kids were _not_ allowed in it, although Cooper and Lila both knew it was there, but once the Avengers had started showing up on his doorstep he'd opened it to them to store anything they brought that was potentially dangerous. Since the Falcon suit contained a highly-programmed drone and short range single-target missiles, it counted.

“Sure you've got everything powered down on that? If any of your stuff blows, no amount of reinforcement I could do on this place'll keep the house from turning into a fireworks display.”

Sam snorted even as he was checking over every bit of the suit to make sure it was deactivated fully before placing it on a bench against one of the walls. “I think I know my own equipment, Barton. But we're good to go – I can take it out tomorrow, _after_ we do all this unpaid work for you. Jerk.”

Clint didn't even try to keep the grin at Sam's pretend anger off his face. “Doing something besides flying around's not gonna kill you. Maybe just make you wish it had. And I don't know about you guys, but I was marking out the boundaries for the new extension earlier and starting to turf everything out, so I'm starving. Let's go eat.”

“Oh is that what that mess was that we saw walking up? Wait, don't tell me we're gonna have to help you out with that, too.”

“Depends on how long you stick around. Speaking of you guys sticking around, why's it just the three of you? We thought Wanda at least would come out.”

A grimace passed over Sam's face, and though he managed to quickly smooth it over into an expression of neutrality there was no way that Clint could have missed it. “Later – I think Steve wants to talk to you two about that without the kids listening in.”

“Okay, then.” There was only one reason Steve would want to have a somewhat private discussion, but Sam was right in that it probably wasn't something that should be discussed in front of Cooper and Lila: Wanda still wasn't doing well, and didn't look to be improving any time soon.

The kids were setting the table when they arrived in the kitchen and so Clint was able to wander over to Laura, slide his arms around her waist from behind as she mashed the potatoes at the stove, and whisper that Steve wanted to speak to them later without the kids thinking he was doing anything but being mushy. Nat, as able to read his body language as ever and spotting the quick _distract_ sign he threw her way, helped out the ruse by calling out a loud “ _ewww!_ ” in her best childish voice to attract their attention and exclaiming on how “smoochy” their parents were being. Cooper and Lila joined in the playfully disgusted yelling, making enough racket to set off Nate and start him kicking as Steve tried to buckle him into his high chair, and allowing Clint and Laura a few seconds to form a quick plan of after-dinner activity that would hopefully get the kids out of their hair long enough to have that talk. Clint capped it off by turning Laura around to kiss her thoroughly in front of the entire crowd, making Sam and Steve both chuckle and the other three and a half start shrieking louder. Maybe it was as cover for something more serious, but he would never get tired of being able to kiss his wife in front of people who knew his entire story. He'd never regretted signing up with S.H.I.E.L.D., but he did regret not being able to have a lot of the simple pleasures that were buried because of the necessary secrecy, like a supportive group of friends who were happy to just see him be with the woman he loved.

Dinner went as smoothly as it possibly could with five adults and three children at the table, even when the conversation inevitably turned to where the other three members of the team were and why they hadn't been able to come. With how quickly the rest of the team had become favorites at the farm everyone had been expecting it, and without missing a beat Nat jumped in to explain that Tony had needed Rhodey and Vision's help with a project for the compound's security while Wanda had stayed behind for more training against the android who was really the only one who could match her power. Cooper and Lila both pouted for a few minutes but quickly forgot it because there were still three of their favorite people staying at their house for two whole days and nights, and the next day would be the “party” for their baby brother which meant cake and ice cream as special treats. Clint, switching between feeding Nate and feeding himself, managed to fire off a couple more signs to Nat as she glanced around the room, receiving a faint nod of agreement for her part in his scheme.

Once the dishes were all cleaned up, Clint announced that Auntie Nat wanted to help her niece and nephew look for caterpillars and butterfly cocoons in the yard and the kids charged outside like a herd of elephants. Nat stuck her tongue out at him as she followed them more sedately, and the remaining four gathered beers, lemonade, the travel playpen, and a few toys to keep Nate occupied before following them and taking seats around the picnic table in the yard. The kids and Nat were scampering around next to the treeline and the crummy little tool shed he kept meaning to replace and would probably be occupied for at least half an hour if their luck was any good. Once they'd gotten Nate settled, Laura poured lemonade for all of them and handed around the cups as she glanced between Steve and Sam. “This is about Wanda, isn't it?”

“Do you get it from your husband or does he get it from you?” She didn't bother to dignify Steve's question with an answer, simply raising her brows a little in a very “mom look” that had even the century-old super soldier cringing a tad. Steve ignored Sam's snort of laughter and twisted the cap off his beer, raising it to his mouth but not yet drinking. “But yeah, it's about Wanda. She's not really... doing any better.”

Clint turned to Laura, both of them frowning a little, before looking back at Steve. “I know she wasn't doing well when she left here, but it's been three weeks. I would've thought _something_ would've picked up.”

“She's doing _better_ , she's just not doing _well_ ,” Sam interrupted before Steve could continue. Steve was usually a very well-spoken man, but this was Sam's area more than it was his. “She's not hiding, she's attending training, eating her meals and as far as we can tell getting enough sleep. But she hasn't really gotten past the …incident. Nobody expects her to be sunshine and rainbows, but she's still dwelling on it so much that she's not moving forward on it. She's stalled at 'functional' and it's starting to affect her performance.”

“She's so afraid of something else going wrong that she won't let herself get to the point where it could get away from her like it did,” Clint said, instantly putting the pieces together. “You're a counselor, Sam, why can't you _help_ her?”

Laura's elbow dug sharply into his side as Sam scowled at the implication that he wasn't doing anything to try and assist his teammate. “I _am_ trying to help her – we're _all_ trying, even Vision. We keep telling her it's not her fault and that she didn't have any other options available to her, but it's not really sticking. You've been in the game, you know things don't go perfectly, but she's had a lot of big failures and mistakes early on in this life and sometimes you just can't recover from that. I can talk to her as a teammate and even as a friend, but I'm too involved in the situation to be able to really be a counselor, and since Nat and I are splitting the work of the number two on the team that doesn't leave a whole lot of time for other things even when I do get the chance.”

Laura's hand threaded through Clint's, their fingers entwining and squeezing gently to calm him down as a frown settled on his features and she took over the questioning. “What about that psychologist? I thought you were looking into taking one on staff.”

“We're looking into it, but finishing the clean up and press junket after Rumlow and keeping track of all the other leads we've got on HYDRA remnants hasn't left a lot of time.” Steve had drained his beer and moved on to the lemonade, and even in the fading sunlight it was easy to see that he wasn't in much better shape than when Clint had last seen him, still tired and run down though hiding it well. Sam caught his eye and nodded just a fraction of a inch; he was looking after his best friend, at least as much as he could when said best friend was a genetically enhanced near-perfect specimen of humanity. No wonder there wasn't a lot of time left for Wanda with all he had to do to make sure Steve didn't run himself into the ground. “You know Tony doesn't know anything about them, and trying to find one who's capable of handling what we get into day in and day out... I know they have to be out there, but if we do this it also needs to be someone the team's comfortable with, and so far none have clicked.”

“I threw out some feelers to my old group back in DC,” Sam interjected. “We're a para-military group, so psychiatrists who're used to treating returning soldiers are probably our best bet. There's been a couple of people interested, but no one's jumped at the position since it'd involve moving a long ways and all of them have established lives down there.”

“Remember I can always get in touch with Fury and see if he's got anyone. I saw three after New York, and Hartley was good. She talked me through not giving up a few times.” Laura's hand tightened around his again and he squeezed back, reassuring her that everything was fine now and that he was still okay. It had been the roughest patch in their marriage through no fault of their own and neither of them wanted to relive it.

“At this rate we might have to take you up on that. I want to give it a couple more weeks to see if any of the nets we've already cast get an answer, but we can't let it go on like this for much longer. If she can't trust her abilities, we can't trust her on the team.”

Silence fell after Steve's unhappy remark, everyone knowing it was true but not wanting to verbally admit it. The shouts and happy laughter coming from Cooper, Lila, and Nat drifted over, a severe contrast to the heavy mood that had settled over the picnic table, and Clint drained half his beer to help him find the words to express the thought he'd been having since the day Nat had called and he wasn't sure had occurred to the rest of the team.

“It's probably not just be Lagos. It's probably Lagos happening when it did.”

“What do you mean?”

“You said it yourself, Sam, she's had a lot of big failures and mistakes early on, and the biggest one happened almost exactly a year before Lagos.”

“The bi- ohh.” Steve cut himself off in mid-word as it struck him. “Sokovia.”

“And Pietro,” Laura added, glancing at Nate in his playpen. The baby was happily occupied in pushing around a Playskool truck, babbling to himself and once in awhile looking up at the adults next to him and giving a happy, squealing laugh. “It makes sense – it happened because of what she did, along with Tony making the choices he made, and it led to her city being destroyed and her brother dying. No one could have guessed that Ultron would come, but she hated Tony and the Avengers so much that she was willing to let you all bring about your own demise, so she holds herself responsible for what happened after that."

"She realized what she'd done in Novi Grad, but by then it was too late." Memories surrounded Clint for a few brief moments, images of robots with glowing eyes, abandoned cars, broken-down buildings, and a terrified young woman who had only just realized how bad the situation was she'd gotten herself into with the choices she'd made in HYDRA's fortress. Coincidence had put them next to each other in the fight, but for all her power - which she'd demonstrated amply later - she wasn't used to the battlefield and the terror that came upon you there. Even though she and her brother had more or less repented and proved they wanted to fix their mistakes back in Seoul, it had been that moment in Sokovia, her fear and panic in the face of the odds against them, that made him start seeing her as _Wanda_ and not just as the Scarlet Witch, a scared kid trying to take control back in a life that had spiraled away from her far before it should have. She'd been vulnerable, defenseless, and maybe she'd only shown herself to him because he was the only one around, but he'd found himself having to reinforce her failing confidence in terms as blunt but understandable as he could make them given the time crunch - and it had worked. She'd collected herself magnificently, bursting out the broken doors with red fire burning around her hands, tearing robots apart like tissue paper. Ever since then, they'd been linked. Especially after losing Pietro. "All the wheels had been in motion too long to just stop them. So she figures that if she hadn't done _this_ or _that_ , maybe her brother would still be alive, maybe her city would still be there. And she got better about it, but then Lagos happened, and she _did_ save lives, but bad things still happened even though she was doing it for all the right reasons."

"So now she thinks that it doesn't matter what she does, or why she does it, it's just going to go wrong eventually. So why try." Laura met his eyes again, unhappiness deep in the brown depths, and squeezed his hand as he did hers. "We need to help her."

“We will.” Clint raised their joined hands to kiss the back of hers, catching sight of a strange expression on Steve's face out of the corner of his eye as he moved. It was a wistful smile, a mixture of happiness, sadness, longing, and something else he couldn't identify all mixed up together before Steve hid it behind his cup of lemonade. Being frozen in the ice had caused Steve to miss so much of what should have been his life, growing old with Peggy Carter and probably helping her form S.H.I.E.L.D., that Clint often wondered if on some level the captain was jealous of him. Steve was always so focused on the team, on protecting everyone, and it had been fairly obvious even from their first meeting that it was his way of coping with losing all that time and still having a purpose in the world as it was now. It was why he'd deliberately traveled to train with different styles of fighters in the months after the Battle of New York, so he would be better equipped for battle and wouldn't feel as useless as Clint knew he had during their first outing. It was the reason he'd joined up with S.H.I.E.L.D. since he was familiar with some of the people in it, it was Director Carter's organization more than anyone's, and the stated goals of the agency were good things he could agree with, even if he didn't like their methods sometimes. He very definitely hadn't liked that Clint had kept his family secret from the team, but Clint refused to apologize for that, and eventually Steve had capitulated (hell, it had taken two years for _Nat_ to learn about them, and even then it had mostly been on accident as he'd been freaking out about Laura being pregnant for the first time on a mission). But Clint had managed to have it both ways, when Steve seemed to think he'd lost any real option for a life outside of Avenging. How true that really was, Clint couldn't say, but Steve seemed to take it as an absolute. Seeing his teammate, a man he knew wouldn't hesitate to put a projectile through the eye of a terrorist from half a mile away, have a normal, stable, _loving_ home life seemed to make him both proud and sad. This life, the _option_ for Clint to have this life, was what he fought to preserve, but it was now locked away from him through a combination of circumstances outside his control. Getting Steve out of the compound more and simply taking him to do normal things like attend concerts and go hiking through some of the national parks was already on his mental to-do list, but Clint bumped it up a few spaces and added having a talk with Sam about what he thought would be most effective for his best friend. Too closely involved or not, Sam was still a trained counselor and would probably have some ideas about unofficial treatments. 

But it wasn't a world-ending catastrophe yet, and they already had something else on their plates for the immediate future. “Tell you what,” he started, making sure to catch both Steve's and Sam's gazes as he spoke. “The kids're finishing school in a week and we're going on a vacation a couple weeks after that. If Wanda-” _and you, Cap_ he added mentally, “-hasn't gotten any better by then, we can call Fury and ask him to send someone over. Maybe she just needs more time to put everything together in her own head – three weeks really isn't that long for someone just starting out, especially not when dealing with all this shit. _Ow_ , Laura, don't pinch me!”

“Language,” she cautioned, making Steve snort with repressed laughter, “here come your children.”

“ _Dad!_ Dad, Dad, look what I found!” His wife was right: Cooper was tearing along the grass towards them in what had to be the most _careful_ run Clint had ever seen, hands cupped in front of him as he moved, Nat following behind him a lot more sedately with Lila on her back and a mischievous smile Clint immediately distrusted on her face. Cooper skidded to a halt next to the picnic table, holding out his hands and spreading his fingers flat to show his prize. “Can I keep it? Please?”

It was undoubtedly an arrowhead, made of stone and probably dropped by a Native American hunting party in the past. By choice, they lived in one of the few stretches of the Midwest that had swaths of trees and a few hills, but Sioux and Blackfoot hunters had still roamed around the area and lost a few of their weapons in the process. Clint himself had found a couple when he was a child, and now he grinned to see that Cooper was carrying on that tradition. “That's great, buddy! Here, lemme see that.” With no more prodding Cooper dropped the arrowhead in his father's hands and slid next to him on the bench, waiting for professional judgment. Clint took his time studying the artifact for dramatic effect, even though he'd held so many arrows in his life he could rank any of them in milliseconds, and then laid it on the table between them and bent over it with his son. “It's flint – see how it's uneven up and down the sides? Flint flakes, and they chipped off little pieces with other rocks to get this shape. If the rock's not good for it, you're not getting an arrowhead.”

“But you could fire it, right Dad?”

“Sure you could, Coop, and we could now if we put it on a new shaft. It just wouldn't fly as far or straight as a modern arrow because it's heavier and it's not evenly shaped.” He looked up as Nat and Lila reached the table, ignoring the smiles on the others' faces and scanning the trees. “Where'd you find this?”

Cooper pointed. “In the roots of that big oak tree about ten feet in. Just the edge was sticking up out of the dirt and it looked weird, so I-”

“Investigated it. Right.” Throwing an arm over Cooper's shoulders, he ruffled his hair a little and bent to kiss his head, then pushed the arrowhead back towards his son on the table. “Probably got exposed in those huge storms we had last week. Wash it off and we'll put it on the piano.”

“Okay, Dad.” But instead of getting up and heading for the house like Clint thought he would, Cooper pushed it across the table in Steve's direction, much to the soldier's surprise. “Do you know anything else about this?”

Steve blinked, confusion on his face as he set his cup down. “Not really, that's more your dad's thing.”

“Oh.” Cooper had inherited his mother's large eyes and open face, and his disappointment was obvious as his expression fell. “Auntie Nat said you knew a lot about fossils.”

Clint and Sam burst into laughter without even trying to hide it at Cooper's comment, Clint managing to set down his beer before he spilled the damn thing. Laura couldn't help but chuckle herself and Lila and Nate joined in the laughter without really being sure what had caused it, while Nat just stood next to the table with a wide grin on her face, watching Steve. The soldier's face was a study as it morphed from amusement to embarrassment to laughter to blushing, before he faced Nat with a little grin and pointed a finger straight at her. “I'm going to get you for that, Romanoff.”

“You can try, Rogers. You can try. All right sweetheart, down.” Still grinning, Nat knelt a little to let Lila slide to the ground in safety, pushing her way onto the bench next to Steve and reaching for one of the lemonade cups as Lila climbed into her lap. Clint and Sam were starting to calm down from their laughter while Cooper obviously still didn't get it, but Nat ignored them all as she drained half her cup before presenting all of them a bright smile. “So! Hard work tomorrow and then a party for the little traitor.”

“You're never going to forgive that doctor, are you,” Laura asked with a smile. 

“Not until I choose to. And then what after that?”

Clint reeled his laughter back under control enough to answer at least somewhat coherently. “That's all I've got planned, unless you want to add something else to the list.”

“I don't know, I was thinking... Star Wars marathon until we all pass out?”

The resounding cheers Nat got from Sam, Clint, and the kids answered her question. 

And that was more or less the way the next day went. Whenever any of the team visited the farm it was impressed upon the kids to be extra quiet to not wake them up early, since set schedules were the rule of the day at the compound and the farm was supposed to be a vacation spot. Steve was up before everyone as he almost always was, thanks to simply needing less sleep, and Clint and Laura were also up early to take care of the kids, but Nat and Sam didn't straggle downstairs until almost ten, Sam because he took the opportunity for more sleep when he could get it and Nat because the farm was the only place she felt safe enough to sleep that late when she wasn't on mission hours. Once everyone had been fed, everyone but Laura and the baby had trouped out to the barn to clean out broken bits of machinery, scrap pieces of construction material from old renovation projects, and a lot of things that no one could identify without a thorough internet search. Clint had rented a small dumpster with the intent of doing a few heavy-cleaning projects at once, and so everything that was going was chucked in with little fanfare. They took a break for a late lunch before getting back to work until Laura called them in to wash up for supper (showers not optional), and spent the evening eating burgers and pasta salad and cake and unwrapping presents for a baby who seemed far more interested in the boxes and paper they'd come in. After putting Nate to bed, Cooper had dug out the cheap toy lightsabers they'd bought for family Halloween costumes a couple years before and the others had thrown extra cushions on the floor of the rec room for the movie marathon, with Sam eventually throwing pillows at both Clint and Nat as they refused to stop quoting Luke and Han's lines. Lila lasted through _A New Hope_ but fell asleep at the beginning of _Empire_ draped over her father's lap, while Cooper managed to keep awake until almost halfway through _Return of the Jedi_ when he just slumped against Steve. The adults let the movie finish at a quieter volume before waking the children to see them properly to bed, promising up and down that the next time they were all together they'd finish the marathon, and maybe even watch the prequels. 

Everyone save Nate (and Clint, who insisted that Laura take a lie-in when she didn't often get to do it) slept a little later the next morning, and while the baby squished mushy cooked pears between his fingers Clint kept himself occupied by making a small mountain of pancakes. Steve, with his greater metabolism, demolished half of them on his own when he came down, but Laura and Nat both ate enough to make Sam's eyes widen in surprise. It was a leisurely morning filled with stories, yawns, coffee, tea, syrup, baby squeaks, and pleas from the older kids to get to go see the compound soon, one of these days – and it was one of the best mornings Clint could ever remember.

“Sam never did get to fly his suit,” Laura commented as they waved the departing Avengers off from a safe distance as the Quin lifted into the sky.

“Probably for the best. A Quin landing's one thing, but what if some pilot passing by saw a man in a flying suit over the area? There's only a couple options for that and it'd be way too easy to target the house.” Clint had an arm around her waist as she leaned into him, Nate in his stroller in front of them and Cooper and Lila chasing after the jet as it picked up speed into the midday sun. “Besides, the compound's a better place to test things out anyway. If he ever fires those missiles here, I'll deck him.”

Laura chuckled next to him, turning to kiss his cheek. “Better warn him about that the next time he's going to come. It wouldn't be proper manners to hit him without warning.”

“Yes, ma'am,” he said with a smile, before raising his free hand to put two fingers in his mouth and blow a shrill whistle. Lila and Cooper's heads turned at the sound, frozen for a moment or two, before turning and bounding back to their parents. “All right guys, ready to help me finish cleaning up the bathroom?”

“Yes!”

“Great! Come on, grab your brother and let's get this done before your mother breaks out her Look.”

“I'd have reason for it, Clinton Barton,” Laura said, her voice mock-hard as she gave him her Mom Look in response to his cue. “You promised you'd have that bathroom done over a week ago.”

“Oh, _no_! It's _the Look!_ Ruuuuun!” Clint broke away from his wife and “ran” for the house at about half his top speed, more than slow enough for his laughing children to keep up with him even though Lila had grabbed Nate's stroller to push like she loved to do. They paused at the stairs in a big pretend-horrified giggling group, Laura following them with a smile at a leisurely walk, as Clint and Cooper untangled Nate from the stroller restraints and picked him up to take him inside. The older kids made their way quickly to the bathroom to get started, Clint calling after them a reminder to put their work gloves _on_ or they wouldn't get any more cake, while he settled his youngest into the playpen as Laura walked through the door. She scratched her fingernails over the back of his neck and he rose to give her a quick kiss and a smile. “Just think – three weeks and we'll be at the lake. No worries, no problems, for six whole days.”

She chuckled again, raising a hand to press her fingers over his lips. “Don't say anything or you might jinx it.”

“Yes, ma'am,” he responded, kissing her fingers as he did. “But it'll still be fun.”

“ _Daaaaaaaaaaddy!_ Aren't you coming?!” Lila's voice rang through the house, making him laugh and pull away from Laura.

“Just a second, sweetheart!” he called back, leaning over to kiss Laura's cheek again. “We'll get this cleaned up soon.”

“You better, Barton. I wasn't kidding when I said you were overdue.”

“Going to fix that now,” he said, heading for the rear of the house and his older children.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahh yes, all the fluff in the goddamn world. I honestly didn't expect this to be its own part, I thought it would just be a section, but then it kept getting longer and longer and I decided to just go with it. I wanted to show how integrated Clint is in the lives of Laura and the kids and how much they and he appreciate him being around... because we all know what's gonna happen. This was really the last chance to do it before the shit hit the fan, so I let it be as long as it wanted. Also, Sam. MARRY ME, SAM.
> 
> But yeah. Next time? Things start turning dark.
> 
> Trivia time!  
> -I do headcanon Clint as mostly deaf, having been caught in an explosion in his mid-twenties, so he knows ASL and uses it to communicate surreptitiously. It made a good secret code for him and Nat in the field, especially overseas. SHIELD made him implants to restore his hearing and even make it a little better than baseline human, so it doesn't come up that much.  
> -I'm not in the camp that thinks the farm is where Clint lived as a child, because hiding a secret family you don't want your enemies (or even co-workers) to find at the place you grew up is just dumb. He says in AoU that "Fury helped [him] set this up when [he] joined," so I imagine Fury helped them find the house in an out-of-the-way spot. He definitely visits sometimes when he wants to get the weight of the intelligence world off his shoulders for a few days.  
> -My friend gave me the idea to reprise Nat's joke from the opening of Winter Soldier. I didn't even try to resist and gave it to Cooper, who very definitely loves dinosaurs and fossils and stuff like that.  
> -Clint is a huuuuge Star Wars nerd but will admit it very rarely and has a Mace Windu lightsaber, the kind that costs $150, in his closet (and no Mace doesn't look like his boss who thinks that). Another friend of mine thinks he turned Nat on to it, so whenever they watch the movies together they get into quote-offs. Clint's always Luke, Nat's always Han, and Lila's trying to learn Leia's lines because Auntie Nat is awesome okay and Leia's A PRINCESS WITH A GUN who gets to order everyone around.  
> -Clint was a goddamn liar when he said in AoU the sunroom would be his last project. Laura clearly didn't believe him and she was right not to.  
> -I put references to _Hamilton_ and _The Bob Newhart Show_ in this part. Ten points to anyone who spots them.  
>  -I imagine Steve is the biggest Clint/Laura shipper after Nat. He sees his friend and teammate living a good, fulfilling life that's not just fighting forever with family who clearly adore him. It's what he signed up to protect and he'll nuke anyone that threatens the farm.
> 
> That's all I can think of for now. Thank you for reading, and I'll see you next week!


	4. Part Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hoooooooly shit this did not want to get written.
> 
> Yeah, it's been much longer than I expected to have between updates for this story, specifically because this part got stuck for almost a _month_. Really, inspiration? _Really_? That said, to a degree it doesn't surprise me, because this chapter is a lot of dialogue about _other_ people having dialogue and that's not the easiest thing to write, more specifically to write _naturally_. I just kept hitting points where I felt like I was repeating myself or quoting the movie verbatim (which I won't do except if I'm dealing specifically with those scenes), having to backtrack to where things started going sideways, and figuring out rewrites that progressed the conversations and didn't completely stall them out. This isn't something I could just skip, as much as I sometimes wanted to, because it lays out so much of what's going to be affecting Clint mentally once everything starts going to hell. Thank you for being patient with me and coming back for YET ANOTHER giant set of words, the biggest I've hit in this story yet. ...It really says something when I've topped this word count multiple times in the past, doesn't it? I've been incapable of shutting up for _years_.
> 
> In case you missed it and you're interested, I did post two stand-alone stories in the interim between parts three and four of this. _The Other Name for Home_ is set mid-AoU and deals with Clint helping bring Nat (and the rest of the team a little) out of the mindfuck fugues Wanda left them in on the tanker and how he decides to bring them to the farm. _Too Much Information_ is a Clint/Laura unapologetic smutfic that's actually less than half smut, because I always want some plot with my smut. It made me giggle. It is also all the words ever. Many, many thank yous to everyone who read, left kudos, or made comments on those two if you're reading this now. Many further thank yous to everyone who read and kudo'd this story in the time since I last posted, and to Basket1544, Cerusee, and hyunbiased for leaving wonderful comments as well. I've already started part five and that one's pretty much guaranteed to be much shorter than this, so hopefully there won't be as massive a delay as there was this time.
> 
> I've been wanting to be done with this for so long that this part hasn't gone through the multiple rounds of proofreading that I normally do, just one or two, so if you see something that needs fixing, please let me know. Soundtrack for this part is "Dark Necessities" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which is actually leaning towards overall theme song of the fic. Something about it just seems to fit the vibe so well... and, coincidentally, the first day I heard it was the day Civil War debuted where I live (May 5). Yay coincidences! Anyway, sit back and enjoy!

The day that everything began falling to pieces started as normally as one could possibly hope in a house with three children of varying ages. Nate was up early, dragging his parents out of bed as he babbled and squalled for food and a diaper change, and while Laura took care of his needs and getting breakfast together for the rest of them Clint chivied the older ones out of bed and through their morning routine against their protests. Cooper especially was starting to edge into the realm of “sleep as late as possible” that Clint remembered being characteristic of most of the teenagers in the group home he'd grown up in, and while Lila woke up fairly early she also didn't want to get out of bed until her older brother did. They'd had long talks about how just because it was summer didn't mean that they'd get to laze around and do nothing, but the novelty of Clint being home for good was starting to wear off after a year and they were getting old enough to challenge parental authority in a way beyond simply stamping feet and insisting they wanted something. While Clint was insanely grateful he'd be there to see his kids growing up, he had to admit he wasn't looking forward to teenage temperamentalness. 

There was a week left before the start of their vacation, and they'd earmarked that day for a final round of shopping in the hope of avoiding any last-minute I-forgot-something panic (Clint was _convinced_ that would still happen, but they could at least try to mitigate it). Making it through an early dinner at an unfamiliar restaurant while Nate tried to throw Cheerios everywhere was easy compared to actually going through Super Walmart afterwards without incident: both Cooper and Lila seemed determined to have this be the Best Vacation Ever and apparently thought that required a lot of stuff they didn't already own and kept trying to sneak things into the cart or beg for them in the hopes of wearing their parents down. Clint could only imagine how his teammates would laugh to see the internationally notorious Hawkeye, greatest marksman in the world and unholy terror to mobsters, criminals, and would-be despots, so thoroughly beaten by two children. 

“You _don't_ need a travel bowling set, Lila, put it back on the shelf.”

“But _Daddy!_ ”

“Lila Emily Barton, if you don't stop being a brat-”

“ _Mommy_ would let me have it! _Mommy can we get this?!_ ”

He knew before moving a step that Laura was coming up behind him with Cooper and would easily be able to read the frazzled expression on his face, and when he met her eyes she flashed him a very quick, reassuring smile before assuming a stern facade and facing their daughter.

“What have we told you about screaming in public and not listening to your parents?”

There was a flicker at the very corner of his vision, and Clint didn't bother turning around. “Don't even try it, buddy.” Cooper had the decency to look shamefaced as he removed the Lego set he'd tried to hide beneath a stack of beach towels while his sister pouted loudly, somehow managing to not wake up Nate where he was sleeping in the cart's baby seat. “How'd we even end up in toys, anyway? We need waterproof sandals and travel food.”

“We don't have any good water toys, Dad,” Cooper said, pointedly ignoring his sister. Lila wasn't loudly begging anymore, but she was definitely trying to give her parents the guilt-tripping huge, pleading eyes, and neither of them were having it. “You guys said we could get a couple.”

“Right,” he sighed. He was starting to regret that. The lodge had to have some kind of toys there, wouldn't it? Or other families? Probably?

He was interrupted in ruing his decision by his phone going off, Jon Bon Jovi's scream filling the air around them. Clint pulled the phone from his pocket and glanced at the number, then looked up to meet Laura's eyes. “Nat.” 

“I wanna talk to her!”

“Me first this time!”

“Uh-uh, kids,” he said, swiping to receive the call and holding it up to his ear, “you guys get to wait. Go find the pool noodles and grab a couple but _no bowling pins!_ ” Clint waited until the kids had scampered away before sighing and shaking his head. “Hey, Nat.”

“Bowling pins? Do I want to know?”

“Lila found a bowling set and she wants it. We won't let her have it and she's pouting. So what's up?”

There was a slight pause, just over a full second, and Clint immediately zeroed in on the phone as his gaze sharpened in alarm. Laura, sorting through the baby toys to try and find something that wasn't a clone of one Nate already had, looked up as he went unnaturally still. It was his tell of snapping into work mode, of being an agent before a father and a part-time handyman, and after all this time Laura was all too familiar with it. It wasn't something that happened often anymore, but whenever he received not-so-good news about the team, it resurfaced. 

“If you're out with the family, I should call back.”

Stepping closer to Laura, he subtly shifted his body to block most of the sound of his voice from reaching up and down their aisle in case anyone else came by but she could still hear him. “Too late, you've got us worried now. What happened, is it Wanda? Steve? You?”

“All of us, including you. It's been a very long day.” He was started to ask her what the hell she meant by that before she cut him off with an answer. “Peggy Carter passed away today in her sleep.”

All the breath went out of him at once in shock. “...Shit.” Laura didn't reprimand him for his language this time, watching him with concern. She couldn't hear Nat's side of the conversation, but she was easily able to tell something was wrong from his expression and the way his shoulders slumped.

Peggy had retired about five years before he'd been recruited, but for at least a decade after said "retirement" she would pop up around the agency in a consultant position or just out of her own free will until her health really started to deteriorate. He'd never directly worked for her, but she'd been involved in a few of his early missions and he'd met her in person a couple of times. She was a commanding woman, strong and self-reliant but also caring and friendly when she could afford to be. It was easy to see why Steve had been so enamored of her back in the war even when she was in her eighties. “Shit. She had to be, what, ninety-six?”

“Ninety-five.” 

“Ninety-five. And she's been going downhill for awhile so it's not surprising, but-”

“Yeah.” Nat's voice was almost wistful over the phone; Clint knew that, to as much of a degree as Nat ever did, she'd looked up to Peggy after her recruitment into S.H.I.E.L.D. A woman who'd known what she wanted, fought against the inherent sexism of her time into becoming a powerful force both politically and tactically, and ran a tight ship where she _earned_ every bit of respect she'd gotten had been something Nat hadn't really known in the Red Room. Her teachers there had been respected out of habit or fear, not for the people they themselves were, which definitely hadn't been the case with Peggy. “At least it was peaceful, and she had a good life before that. There's always the chance it won't be...”

The image of Coulson's body, laid out in the helicarrier's med bay on a surgical table, flashed through his mind. “Yeah.” Feeling Laura's eye on him, Clint turned to murmur to her quietly, “Peggy Carter died.”

“Oh, no.” Her own tone matched his, and she tugged the phone away from his ear a little to hit the speaker button, turning down the volume about halfway to try and keep the conversation private. “How's Steve doing?”

“Not good. We all knew it would happen some day, she's been getting worse over the past few years, but even knowing it was coming doesn't make you _ready_ for it. And since she was the only link to his past...”

“When's the funeral? He is going, isn't he?”

“It'll be in three days in London.” Clint briefly wondered why she was being buried in England given she'd lived and worked in America for most of her life, but it wasn't an important question and he let it slide as Nat continued. “He was asked to be a pallbearer, and he already said yes. Sam's going with him, and I'll be there, too.”

Laura nodded slightly, still watching the phone. “Take care of him, all right? If he needs to come back out for a few days after it's over, tell him he's welcome any time.”

“I will.” The pause Nat took made both Clint and Laura look at each other, matching caution forming in their eyes – they both knew Nat more than well enough to know that she hadn't said everything yet, and when she took her time like she was doing, it was bad. “There's something else happening in three days you should know about.”

“...What is it.”

Another hesitation, and Clint felt his heart skip a beat. “We shouldn't discuss this in public. Someone could hear.”

His eyes met Laura's once again, and he knew they'd both reached the same conclusion at Nat's words. “Go out to the car,” Laura murmured, just as another family turned into the toy aisle they were still on, a woman followed by three kids between about four and eight. She leaned up to kiss his cheek briefly before gripping the cart's handle and starting to walk off in the direction Cooper and Lila had gone. “We'll get this done and meet you out there.”

“Thanks,” Clint said, moving towards the door, Nat's own thanks echoing his before he cut off the speaker function. He nearly ran into Lila and Cooper as he rounded the corner, holding eight pool noodles and three rubber balls between them, but he didn't bother to try and corral their toy impulses for the moment as something serious was definitely going on with the team. “Stay with your mother and _listen_ to her. I'll see you guys when you're done.”

“Okay, Dad,” Cooper called after him, clearly perplexed, while Lila watched him leave with a sad look on her face that tore at his heart. He'd explain everything to them in just a bit, though.

Once he'd retired and Nate had been born, they'd been forced to buy an SUV that was big enough to carry the whole family. He still had his old truck he'd bought after his medical discharge from the army, and Laura her hatchback that she refused to give up even though it was starting to die, but neither of them were up to hauling both children and loads of groceries or construction supplies at the same time. He climbed into the driver's seat of the dark blue Armada, cranked the engine to get the air flowing, and raised the phone to his ear once more. “This is the best we're gonna get until we get back to the house and I'm not waiting that long. What happened?”

Reassured that she wasn't going to blow her partner's cover now, Nat didn't hesitate. “Before we received the news about Peggy, Tony showed up, and he brought a visitor: Secretary of State Ross.”

“ _Ross_?! That _dickbag_?” Clint's reaction to that name was instantly violent, starting so much he kicked the well next to the pedals and barely missed smashing the horn, but Nat had to expect that. Ross had engineered all the crap around Banner's fugitive status, flat-out _shattering_ international law to try and recapture a more-or-less innocent man, and because of his vindictive pursuit of a man who hadn't asked for what he'd gotten into, especially having not been given all the information he needed for the experiments he was performing, there had been three Hulk incidents within a fairly short time resulting in urban areas getting trashed and innocent people being put in harm's way. Nat had almost _died_ in two of them, which would have been reason enough for Clint to hate him, but Ross and S.H.I.E.L.D. had had a somewhat reluctant mutual partnership (on the agency's side at least) before Banner returned from Argentina and had collaborated on a few missions. Clint himself had worked on some of those, being the best sniper either S.H.I.E.L.D. or the army could field, and he'd never liked working under the general no matter what the operation was. Thaddeus Ross was very much the style of commander that had gotten him in trouble multiple times over during his own time in Special Forces, the kind that was brilliant on paper but kind of utterly horrible in real life. He was so sure of his own righteousness, absolutely convinced that everything he was doing was the best course, for the best reasons, and would produce the best results, that it ended with a person in charge who didn't listen to suggestions from his underlings more than ninety percent of the time, made figurative deals with the devil to get various advantages he thought he needed in difficult situations, threw his men at a problem until they “solved” it, no matter what the cost to those men may have been, and wouldn't take any sort of criticism unless it came from the goddamn president himself. He was a last vestige of the changing face of armed combat, holding on to the same outmoded views that had killed so many soldiers as far back as World War I, refusing to give way to men like Nick Fury who wouldn't take any bullshit but also wouldn't spout any themselves. Clint had never been one to accept “because I said so” as a reason for anything even back when he was a child, serving in the Forces hadn't drilled it out of him, and if anything being employed by S.H.I.E.L.D. had only made it worse since not only could he get in Fury's face and tell him to go fuck his orders, but Fury _expected_ him to do so when he felt it was necessary.

Performing those joint ops with Ross and his men had been good on multiple levels: most of them had targeted terrorist cells so they were removed from the picture then and in the future, he'd been able to reunite with some of his old groupmates and catch up on the decade-plus of their lives he'd missed after being discharged, and it had proved to him that S.H.I.E.L.D. was the place he truly belonged in the end. But he'd had to be held back, and in the end sent off to command his subset of the mission, in order to avoid breaking Ross' nose for him as the asshole moments just kept piling on top of each other.

Sometimes he really wished he could've been a fly on the wall for the yelling match that he knew had happened behind closed doors with Fury and Ross. It was more a surprise that Ross even still _had_ a nose after that one.

“He wasn't _immediately_ antagonistic,” Natasha answered, weary and resigned. “The Duel of Harlem sort of _very obviously_ proved he didn't know everything and Bruce escaped after that, his daughter still refused to reestablish contact with him, Tony stomped all over him with Blonsky, and the team doing its job properly without him having any input on it in the end gave him a rough few years.” 

“Not rough enough, _please_ tell me someone punched him in the teeth. Preferably Steve, or Rhodey in full armor.”

“I thought about it. I'm sure Steve thought about it, but Rhodey seems to take him as he wants to be taken. I'm not sure he knows just how bad Ross has been in the past since he's Air Force and they don't have a lot of crossover. Ross is at least honest enough to know that he has no idea how to command pilots and has left that to the proper leaders in the past.”

“Probably because he wanted them to go all kamikaze and they all kicked him in the junk.”

“Down, boy, you don't have deal with him, though he's going to want you to.” He could feel his hackles start to rise, opening his mouth to make a blistering statement over how much he was _not_ going to listen to Ross, before Nat cut him off with one statement. "Believe me. It's worse than you can imagine."

"I don't know, I can imagine quite a bit."

"Stop quoting Star Wars. We might not have a _team_ anymore."

That brought him up dead, and he pulled the phone away from his ear to look at it as incredulously as he would Natasha if she were in front of him. No _team_? What the ever loving hell...

"Just be quiet for a few minutes and let me talk. You need to know this if you want to stay out of it."

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

When Laura and the kids reached the Armada twenty minutes later, they found Clint slumped forward in his seat, arms folded over the steering column, forehead resting on the wheel, and eyes shut as he tried to process everything Nat had told him. It was all too much and not nearly enough, completely expected and totally out of the blue. The mass of contradictions swirled around in his head, trying to form a coherent picture and failing as he couldn't find his mental footing in all the mess that had suddenly been dropped on him. For once he didn't even notice when his family was nearby.

He was alerted to their presence by a hesitant tapping on the window next to him and his daughter's small, almost frightened voice as it came to him muffled through the glass. "Daddy? Can we come in?"

"Sure, sweetheart. Sure.” Pulling himself off the steering wheel, he knew he couldn't hide the weariness he was feeling now, but he needed to reassure his kids. Lila was still young enough that she didn't always understand why Clint left or what he'd dedicated his life to for so long – she knew that he went away to save the world, but for a little girl, sometimes the world wasn't any bigger than the town she lived in. The three years Cooper had on his sister gave him a better understanding, but even he still struggled with it at times, most especially when Clint was gone for weeks on end for a deep-cover mission or recovering from an injury in a S.H.I.E.L.D. infirmary. Clint popped the door and folded himself out of the seat, scooping up Lila to give her a hug and slinging an arm around Cooper's shoulders as Laura watched. “Sorry... Auntie Nat had some bad news for me.”

“Is she okay?” Lila asked, eyes wide.

“What happened, Dad?” Cooper asked, obviously worried.

Clint nodded, pressed a kiss to Lila's forehead, and let her slide back to the asphalt. “She's fine. Let's get this stuff loaded up and I'll tell you about it on the way home.”

Both kids nodded and reached for the white plastic bags in the cart while Clint moved to Laura's side to kiss her cheek and murmur a quiet thanks into her ear for letting him go off in the middle of family time. She took over unbuckling Nate from the cart and getting him settled in his car seat while Clint helped the older kids load up the bags, asking if they'd remembered extra toothpaste and coloring books and receiving confirmation in an effort to ground himself properly again in the here and now. While Laura definitely already had an idea that something potentially worse than Peggy passing had happened, Clint managed to flash her two signs without the children noticing as they loaded the car - _bad politics_. Her eyes narrowed slightly; Clint absolutely detested politics, so for him to be this worked up over something meant it was major, but nodded in return. They would talk in more detail when they got home.

Clint waited until they were on the highway heading home before glancing in the rear view mirror to Cooper and Lila's still-troubled expressions, Nate dozing in the last row in his car seat. “You kids remember what Uncle Nick used to do, right? How he ran S.H.I.E.L.D.?” And still did, in a lot of ways, but that wasn't important right then.

“But there's no S.H.I.E.L.D. anymore, Dad,” Cooper pointed out, and Clint didn't bother to correct him.

“No, and there wasn't always. It was started after World War II by three people – Howard Stark, Tony's father, an army general named Chester Philips, and a third person: a British secret agent named Peggy Carter.”

He knew Cooper, at least, would know that name, since Coop pretty much lived for Captain America stories, but he was a little surprised when Lila snapped to attention as well. “She was Cap's girlfriend!”

Laura nodded, turning in her seat as much as she could to face the kids. “She was much more than that, but yes, she and Captain Rogers were in love. If he hadn't gone down with the plane to save the US... But she went on to found S.H.I.E.L.D., and run it just as well – or better – than Uncle Nick did. Everyone respected her, and she had a very difficult job that she was great at, more than any of your teachers or your principles. But she was born in 1921, and that was a very long time ago. Auntie Nat told us she passed away today.”

Both kids fell silent for a moment, processing that. It wasn't like they hadn't had any experience with death before, Laura's mother having passed away not long before the HYDRA thing and also having lost a couple of their older neighbors, but it was still a concept that was fairly distant for both of them. 

“...Was it bad?” Cooper asked, his eyes serious.

“No, Coop, it wasn't bad. Her body was just tired. She went to sleep and just didn't wake up.”

Lila piped up then. “What about Uncle Steve? Is he going to die too?”

“No, sweetheart, he's not. He missed most of those years, remember?” Truthfully no one was sure how those years had affected Steve, but suspended animation was the most likely theory and it was what they were running with until they had more information. Clint had been able to detect a slight aging in the captain since the Battle of New York, more or less concurrent with anyone else in their late twenties or early thirties, maybe a little slower. “Just think of him like he's Auntie Nat's age, that's more or less what it comes out to. But he's sad. He cared about her, and she was the only one of his friends left from the war. Remember when Gramma died, how sad your mom was?”

“Yeah,” they both chirped and went silent again. It was a couple of minutes before they started tentatively asking more specific questions, and their parents spent most of the rest of the drive home trying to explain the concept of Alzheimer's and how exactly Clint had known Peggy Carter when she didn't actually run S.H.I.E.L.D. while he'd worked there. It was a subdued trip, and he was honestly glad to have it done with.

When they got to the farm, Clint started the coffee maker immediately after bringing the first load of bags in, and Laura didn't protest even though the normal rule was chores done before drinking. With the groceries put away and the stuff that needed to be packed for the trip piled in an out-of-the-way corner of the living room, Clint and Laura got Nate settled in his playpen and Cooper and Lila in front of the TV watching _Finding Nemo_ , one of the only ones they could agree on since Coop was starting to transition out of "kiddy" movies. While Laura picked up the scattered shoes and bags that had spawned in the kitchen after the shopping trip, Clint poured himself a cup of coffee and tossed it back in one go, poured a second not quite full, then sifted around in the cabinet they kept their liquor in and found the really good vodka. He didn't normally drink much, since his alcoholic abusive father had left him with a lot of baggage he was still working through to some degree, but the situation called for some help along with the caffeine. 

“That bad, huh?” Laura asked, watching him top off the coffee mug with the vodka almost to the brim.

“Maybe worse,” he responded, taking a gulp of the mixture before refilling the empty space with more vodka. He could almost feel the dual sensations of the caffeine and the alcohol flowing through his bloodstream even though he hadn't had time to metabolize it yet, feeling his body both relaxing and transitioning to another level of clarity. Shoving the vodka back in the liquor cabinet, he headed for his normal seat at the table, Laura sitting next to him and reaching for his hand not holding the mug. He gave her a squeeze in return, took another drink of the coffee mix, then set it down and let out a heavy sigh. “It finally happened. Regulation, control. Just it got so much worse than we were thinking it might.”

“The government's trying to take control? Now? But the team's been operating for years, and they-”

“Not _the_ governement. _All_ governments. The entire UN's jumped on this.” Laura's eyes widened in shock, and Clint took another drink of coffee before continuing. “There's been talk about this kind of thing since Sokovia, and kind of before that, but when you think about it the team hasn't had a lot of actual _missions_. New York was aliens and we-” His voice caught in his throat at the words he'd tried to say, Laura's hand tightening on his again as he cleared the obstruction and kept speaking. “-they didn't have anything to do with that starting.”

“Neither did you,” she said softly.

“Not willingly, but I did.” But it wasn't the time to have another debate about the past; what had happened had happened, couldn't be changed, while what was coming was going to be bad enough for the team as it was. “But New York was explainable. So was DC, but Sokovia – that one was on us, or at least Tony and Bruce, and maybe we saved most of the population but there were still dozens of people dead and a giant crater that's turned into a lake now. And Johannesburg before that, since we never made it officially known that Wanda caused Bruce to lose control, and it looks like Lagos was the final straw. The explosion that happened when Wanda threw Rumlow away from Cap-”

“That was _not_ her fault!” she said sharply, and Clint felt a surge of pride and love for the woman next to him, that she could be so open and caring but also fierce as a wolf when her family was threatened. Laura's eyes shone almost as Wanda's did when her powers manifested in the kitchen's muted overhead lighting and her hand clenched hard on his, an involuntary reflex at a perceived threat. “She did the best she could, she didn't mean for it to hit that building-”

“You know that, I know that, I think even most of the news networks know that now. They haven't been as terrible to her lately, but they have been talking about if she even had a right to be there, since she's so powerful.” Overall he wasn't sure if the shift in their reporting was a good thing or not; it meant that there was less overt condemnation of Wanda, but the undercurrent in the stories still laid at least part of the blame at her feet, and in a lot of ways that was more insidious. Most people could tell the good from bad in black and white; very few people really _believed_ that Wanda had meant to cause all that destruction after seeing the grainy phone videos from the scene, because she was so obviously devastated at it, but letting people "come to their own conclusions" with carefully-orchestrated arrangements of "the facts" made them more wary of her as their own fears went to work on them. The fact that the public knew about and understood so little of her powers probably didn't help; Clint had heard a few people asking why she hadn't just made the bomb go away at all, and he'd had to bite his tongue hard to not get into a shouting match with the man he'd heard ramble that question at the Home Depot two weeks ago. “A lot of people've been saying she overstepped her authority and that she made the problem worse instead of better. They got permission from the Nigerian government to track Rumlow down there, but from what I've heard the upper government may not have told the street cops and other people like that that the Avengers might be there, so no one was prepared for it. And Cap faltered, which they've got on tape, and since Rumlow's dead...”

“There's no one else to blame.” Laura was a smart woman and could put the pieces together quite well on her own without his help, and she clearly did that in a very few moments before meeting his eyes squarely. “So what did the UN do?”

“A two-inch-thick book that apparently weighs as much as Nate from what Nat said. All very official and in legalese worse than anything S.H.I.E.L.D. ever produced unless it was burying something no one was supposed to know about. And the team's got three days to decide if they want to sign it or retire.”

Her eyes narrowed a little at that choice of word. “Retire – like you?”

“Yeah, like me, only worse. I _chose_ to step back. I have a life here with you and the kids, and if I wanted to or had to I could find another job that didn't involve world travel or drug cartels or ever having to shoot a bow again. Me and you and Fury, we planned for this one day, planned for me getting out and keeping you guys safe at the same time. And this is a safe place for the rest of the team, but the only one who can go out and do stuff like buy groceries here is Nat because she's established here as part of the family and even that could fall apart one of these days if people start paying more attention to the news. Everyone else is already too famous to not be recognized, and then our cover's blown.” It was a risk they took every time anyone came to the farm now, that no one would happen by and accidentally discover an Avenger on the premises. It would be too damn easy to make the connection about who Clint really was, not to mention his sister Natalie, and while he liked most of the people who lived nearby he wasn't sure how many of them could keep their mouths shut about his identity. The enemies he'd made during his time with S.H.I.E.L.D. could so easily find the farm if word spread... “Steve and Nat, they don't have any other way to live now - Rhodey and Sam would probably be okay, but not those two. Who knows about Wanda, I don't think even she does, she never really had a life that wasn't scraping to get by since she was at least a teen until she landed with us with all these powers she doesn't fully understand so even if she wanted to leave, could she really do it, and that's not even getting started on Vision, he's already artificial and he doesn't have a _life_ if he's not protecting the world, that's the thing Stark and Banner programmed him for and he's good at it, he's so good at it he's almost making the rest of us obsolete-”

Laura squeezed his fingers harder than before, cutting him off mid-sentence, and pushed his mug into his grip. “Drink, you're babbling.” She was right, and he obeyed without arguing, knowing the only time he started rambling like that was when he was really disturbed, and knowing she knew it, too. “If they sign it, what happens?”

“What's gonna happen even if they don't sign it. The UN's setting up a committee that's supposed to oversee the Avengers and decide whether to send them in or not. Someone else is gonna be saying when they should act and when they have to stand back.”

“That's good, isn't it?” she asked, standing to retrieve the coffee pot from the machine and a trivet to place it on, refilling his mug as he shot her a grateful look before taking her seat again. “If someone else is making that call, then the news networks can't blame them if something goes wrong.”

“Yeah, in theory. But it's a committee, and they don't know how big it'll be. The more people on it, the more complicated things'll be. The Avengers is a first-response team, not a political tool, and there's plenty of people who're gonna be trying to use them that way. What if something happens in Israel and a Palestinian member doesn't want them to go, or vice versa? Or China hates Tibet. That kind of thing. And even if the people on it are reasonable, adding more opinions and reaching an agreement about sending them will take longer just to get everyone on the same page to say yes, and it could be too late by the time the team gets there. Everything's just a goddamn mess.”

Clint fell silent, sipping his coffee and sighing around swallows of the hot liquid while Laura watched him. He wasn't over-exaggerating, and Laura knew him far too well than to think he was, but he was still holding back from telling her the last part that really made everything horrible. She'd ask, and soon, but until he said it out loud, it didn't have to be _real_.

But she didn't let him put it off for long. "Are they going to sign?"

"...They can't agree." Everything else up to that point could have been dealt with - there'd be some difficulty involved, but it was workable, barely. But this, right here was where it all started falling apart. "It's not a team decision, it's a personal decision. Not all-or-nothing, it looks like whoever signs, they'll just take and form a new team out of them, or maybe send them in as solo operatives depending on what's going on. They spent all day fighting about it after Ross left-”

“ _Ross_?”

“Oh yeah, didn't I mention? He's the one that brought this to them.” While Laura didn't have his personal experience with the general, and didn't know Bruce's history well enough to know how badly the former general had fucked him over, she'd heard enough of Clint's rants and Natasha's derision to have a low opinion of the man, high-ranking politician or not. “Can't really blame the UN for going through the official channels for a US-based group, but it's _Ross_. Nat said no one punched him, but if I'd been there...”

She immediately frowned. “You're not going to, are you? Be there?”

“Hey.” Letting go of his mug, he reached across the table to take her hands, rubbing his thumbs on the backs of them as he tried to counteract her troubled expression. “I said it and I meant it. Unless there's another world-ending alien invasion, I'm done. They can get by fine without me for the stuff they normally handle, probably better than if I was there. One less person to get shot at, right?”

Her eyes darted down to his side where Cho's machine had repaired him during the first Sokovia mission, the place he honestly couldn't feel any difference in but believed her when she said she did. His job required him to know his body almost _too_ well, all its ins and outs and peculiarities so he could adapt instantly to them and not get himself killed, but that outside perspective sometimes gave more clarity. “You know I agree that what you did was important. I knew what I was getting into, signing up with you for S.H.I.E.L.D., even if the Avengers weren't formed yet. But we like having you here, with us, at home.”

“I like being here,” he said quietly. Laura had supported him through his entire career with the agency, dealt with him not being there for just under half of their marriage, handled two children by herself for a sum total of years while he was running around the planet. Even after almost two decades he still had no idea how he got so lucky when he'd met her, and again when she hadn't left him after the dumbest proposal ever. “And I swear unless something is literally gonna blow up the planet I'm not leaving. But Nat's saying they're gonna ask me.”

“And you'll say...?”

“To shove it. Sounds like everyone they know the location of is on the list, so the current six and me and Tony, not Banner or Thor or any of the other blips that have started appearing on the radar lately, but I'd wager that if any of them show up again they'll draft a new extension to the whatever they're calling it and have them sign. If they don't just lock Banner up in a lab somewhere first. I already told Nat to count me out, and as long as I don't stick my name on that paper, they won't hunt me down and pull me in.”

Laura sighed, closing her eyes and letting go of one of his hands to run hers through her hair, pushing it away from her face; he knew how stressful him not being there had gotten at times, and it was obvious she was thinking back to those absences. But he meant every word he said, and he'd repeat it as often as necessary. “It's all so fast... three days? Just _three days_ for them to decide this?”

“I know. I don't think any of them are happy about that, but it's what they've got to work with and a lot of them have already made up their minds. Sure does sound like the UN decided to spring this on them last-minute in order to not give them time to think about it, though. Just make them sign and then when they object to it, whoops, they're screwed, it was in the contract.”

“Yeah, no kidding.” She sighed again, then reached for his coffee cup and lifted it to take a drink of the mix inside herself; Clint gave a deliberately-playful growl at the “theft” of his caffeine-and-booze concoction, and Laura stuck out her tongue at him when she put it down. “What's Nat going to do?”

They'd been married for a long time and had picked up on some of each others' habits, and when Clint hesitated at the question, Laura's gaze zeroed in on him in a near-perfect imitation of his own focus when falling back into work mode. He shifted in his chair, trying to find a better way to phrase it, but finally gave up and just let it fall out. “She's for it. She's signing.”

“For it? The woman who told all those Congressional hearings to go skydiving without a parachute two years ago is _for this_? With _Ross_?”

“Okay, not 'for it,' but she's doing what Nat does and planning for the future.” It was his turn to sigh and close his eyes, raising both hands to rub his face as their earlier conversation played through his mind.

_”You can't be serious, Nat. You can't want to go through with this!”_

_“I don't, but I have to.” Her voice was tired and worn out, something that few people had ever heard except in extreme circumstances, and he could picture her so easily in that moment: sitting on her bed, bowed down over herself a little, fingers pinching the bridge of her nose in order to stave off a forming headache. Trying to play middle ground in a group of very strong personalities could be exhausting, as they both knew all too well. “There's nothing we can do to stop this, not with so many countries backing it. Not with it coming on this suddenly. And I know that was deliberate, but this is the situation we were given to deal with, and you and I both know we can't change the situation into something we like better. The world still needs us, and we still need each other. At least this way there's someone else for people to blame if something goes wrong-”_

_“You don't know that they'll do that.”_

_“Statistically speaking, people blame the person at the top of the heap, and the UN just took us off the top and put themselves on. And even beyond that, if we don't do this now, we'll have it done to us later. Cooperating now means we have more say in what happens, and if we take that say early enough,_ now _, they'll be used to us having it and will be more likely to listen to us when we object to something or insist on something else. Maybe we can work in clauses in the future about bringing people on as specialists for certain missions so if we need you you don't have to sign the whole thing, or we can pick the people who oversee us after we scout the waters. We always knew this would happen – we just need to try to keep as much control for ourselves as we can, and this is our best chance for it.”_

_He'd sighed, leaning forward to rest his head on his arms folded over the steering wheel. “I hate this.”_

_“I hate it, too.” Nat had answered his sigh with her own, and he could see her tucking her hair behind her ear. “But it's the best, or maybe the only, chance we'll get to have any kind of control. We've worked too hard to lose all of this. Not again.” Her voice was quiet as she finished, and in it he could hear the echoes of all the losses she'd suffered over her life – her family when she was little, girls who potentially could have been friends in the Red Room, the Red Room itself after they'd branded her a traitor when she'd defected to S.H.I.E.L.D., and most especially the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D. two years before and the realization that Fury wasn't entirely sure he could trust her, though she'd been brought back into that fold quicker than anyone else but a bare handful of people. She'd finally found a place to belong, a place she was certain was doing right so she could wipe the red from her ledger, and she'd fight tooth and nail to keep it for as long as she had to. “If this is what it takes...”_

_“This is what you'll do. I know. I just wish-”_

_“Yeah.” She sighed again, a heavy sound like the weight of the world was on her shoulders – which, in a lot of ways, it really was. “I do, too.”_

“She's got a point.” Admitting that hurt, not because he didn't understand Nat's reasoning, but because of the fact that she was having to make this decision in the first place. “They've stuck 'em between the rock and the hard place and started squeezing the vice. Nat said that Vision pointed out that since Tony announced himself as Iron Man back in 2010, incidents with powered people or comparatives have shot through the roof, especially as more and more of us have shown up. That's not gonna stop now, so the team's still needed, and this is the only way they'll let them work.”

Laura snorted through her nose, her mouth twisting into an almost bitter frown, eyes dark with annoyance. “It'd serve them right if everyone just 'retired' and let them try to deal with that on their own a couple of times. The UN would be falling all over themselves to bring them back, with as many benefits as they wanted.”

Even though they were discussing weighty, potentially horrible things, Clint couldn't help but grin at that, because the exact same thought had crossed his mind more than once as he was talking to Nat. “I love you, you know that?” 

Laura flashed him a smile back, but then sighed and shook her head. She looked fatigued just hearing about it all, something Clint understood all too well. “It _would_ serve them right, but they wouldn't do it. They wouldn't want anyone to get hurt because they sat back and did nothing.”

“Yeah. That's a large part of why Nat's agreeing to it. And if they did that, when the guns and tanks don't work on some of the stuff we've faced down, they'll head for operation overkill – like that nuke.” 

It wasn't like he'd never seen missiles before, having been in both the army and with S.H.I.E.L.D. for over half his life, but seeing that nuclear warhead traveling through Manhattan was still one of the eeriest memories he had. To know that the World Security Council had overridden Fury, who was smarter and craftier than all of them, and jumped straight into ignoring collateral damage that encompassed the entire island of Manhattan, some of the neighboring boroughs, and all the millions of people that lived there... It wasn't like he'd ever had rose-colored glasses about the Council, very few in S.H.I.E.L.D. really did since they were collectively a bunch of cynical bastards. But it had been the ultimate desperation move, jumped to far too early and with no guarantee it would _work_. Selvig's device was holding the portal open, sure, but they didn't know that it _could_ be blown up, considering it was impenetrable to anything except compatible energy, of which the staff was the only known example at that time. Nat had a potential way to close it she'd been working on, the team was doing pretty good at holding back the aliens and not letting them escape the area, and yet they'd decided to just send in the nuke. It was more than stupid, it was _baffling_. Sure they'd had a rough patch – or five – but it wasn't like any of them had been down for good when that decision had been made. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” only applied when the situation was _lost_ , which it hadn't been yet. Thank god Stark had managed to get rid of it – and that he'd smashed it into the alien mothership in the process.

“No, no more nukes,” Laura said, taking his hand again, and he returned the squeeze she gave him. “What's the tally then?”

“Sounds like a pretty even split. I'm out, I'm not sure if they even talked about me, but so are Steve and Sam. Wanda apparently didn't say a word about what she thought while they were discussing it, and Nat, Vision, Rhodey, and Tony are in.”

“-Wait a minute, Steve's _against_ this while Stark's _for_ it?”

“Right? Sounds ridiculous, but there you go.” Clint finished off the last of the coffee and poured himself a new cup, foregoing the alcohol this time. He'd had the equivalent of somewhere between two and three shots of vodka already, enough to calm him down and loosen him up a little after a very tense revelation and discussion and help him sleep later on despite all the worry that was still going through his brain, but not enough to impair him in any way. He wasn't going to push it any farther than that. “With Cap it's probably because of all the HYDRA stuff and then Tony going behind the backs of the rest of us to make Ultron. He's had a lot of bad experiences since he woke up with secrets being kept from him, even way back with...” He couldn't help but pause. “-with everything that was happening before New York, when he found out S.H.I.E.L.D. was making weapons based on the Tesseract and the Destroyer. He doesn't really know Ross but he had a lot of the same thoughts I did, about being told to go somewhere they didn't need to be or not being allowed to go somewhere they were needed. And he's made mistakes but he's always owned up to them and _owned_ them, taken the heat for what's gone wrong.”

Laura was, as always, more than smart enough to make her own very accurate deductions. “He's afraid of what could happen if he doesn't have that control.” 

“Pretty much. And Tony's pretty much the opposite.” He fell silent again, staring at the cup in his hand, Laura watching him and waiting patiently for him to continue as he sorted out his feelings about all of the things that had happened since a billionaire genius playboy philanthropist had been kidnapped in the Middle East and a hammer had crash-landed in New Mexico. “He's had control, he's _always_ had control, over himself and what he did and his company and his armors and all that. When he doesn't have it, he kind of panics and works to get it back. He got a severe wake-up call back when he was kidnapped in 2010 about how he was living his life, the path he was on if he kept going the way he was, and what the world would be like if he didn't do something to stop the harm he'd already caused. And that's good, we all needed that, the world's a lot better off without terrorists getting their hands on his weapons and with all the tech he's invented since then. But he gets these ideas and he runs off to try them without telling anyone and sometimes that makes problems.”

“Ultron.”

“Right. Wanda might have pushed him to try it with the scepter, but he was already working on the programming before that. And a lot of times he just doesn't think before he speaks, like when he gave out his address on national news and got his Malibu home blown up. He's got good intentions, but-”

They both paused and looked up as a scream of glee came from the rec room next to the stairwell – Lila, though they could hear Cooper's more sedate laugh behind it, reacting to some part of the movie. Nate gave a small gurgle in his sleep at the sound of his siblings' antics, murmuring and wiggling a little as he re-positioned himself, but didn't react otherwise.

When it became obvious after a few moments that they weren't about to have a sudden child invasion in the kitchen, Laura shook her head and continued. "So he's trying having someone else making the decisions who's less involved, more impartial. He thinks that'll make it better."

"Looks like. And in some cases, he's probably right. He's definitely the one of us with the most disasters that he caused to his name, and he doesn't want any more of them to happen. So if he gives someone else the power of those decisions, maybe not as many people suffer. He always _wants_ to do good things, but when it comes back to bite him, it comes back big time." He drained most of the coffee in the mug, grimacing. "Sounds like that's part of what led to him agreeing - apparently someone ambushed him at his MIT presentation this morning after he was done. A mom who had a son who was on some kind of work outreach program in Sokovia and was one of the ones who didn't make it. A year later she tracks Tony down, shoves a picture of her kid at him, and tells him she blames him entirely for her kid being dead." He groaned, shaking his head. "Idiot."

"Clint, she just lost her son," Laura said with a tone of sharp reproof.

"I don't give a shit." His words were more blunt and bitter than he expected, but Clint couldn't bring himself to care about that as he watched her over the rim of his mug. "Yeah, losing a kid's about the worst thing that can happen to you. It's terrible and it's awful that anyone has to go through it, and in a perfect world, no one would. No one wanted _her_ to and it sounds like he was a great kid and he sure didn't deserve to die like that because no one did. But Tony's the one who made the robot, not who made the meteor, and people who aren't idiots know you can't blame someone for what they didn't do. Look at the twins, they blamed him for making the missile that hit their apartment building and killed their parents and not the people who fired the damn thing into a residential block and that's what led us to Ultron in the first place. Hell, even look at all the shit Wanda's been going through since Lagos, people blaming her for that explosion killing civilians instead of the guy who built and strapped a suicide bomb to his chest. Tony's still kicking himself every day for Ultron a year later and he's not about to stop and Wanda's doing the same about Lagos now. We've done stuff wrong, we haven't been able to save everyone, and that's going to kill us until we die for real. But that's one of the major problems with these documents, is that they're blaming _us_ and holding us accountable for things other people cause. It's like that one stupid lawsuit from years back, with that burglar who broke in through someone's kitchen window, remember that? He tripped and fell and cut himself really badly on a knife someone had left out and sued them for him getting hurt because he'd been breaking the law in the process."

"You _know_ that's not the same thing, Clint."

"Principle's the same. But that's the other reason I won't sign this thing, I've already got enough doubt about things I've done and people that might've gotten hurt because of what I did. And it doesn't matter what anyone says - I helped New York happen. People _died_ because of me, _friends_ of mine, and I'm never gonna get them back. You know how many people wanted me in front of a firing squad after that even though I never chose to do it and it took them so long to convince them I hadn't been in control. Fury and Nat are the only reasons I wasn't assassinated by someone mourning a person they lost. The WSC wanted to punish me or kill me. What would the UN do to me? At least if I'm the one making the decisions, all the fuck ups are my own. I can't deal with having something else go wrong because of someone I'm forced to listen to again, I've already had way too much of that in my life."

It was obvious that Laura didn't agree with him completely by the slightly troubled frown she wore, but she understood his point enough to nod and squeeze his hand again. Clint could admit that he should probably have more sympathy for Mrs. Spencer, and if she hadn't gone after Tony like she had he probably would, but what he'd said wasn't wrong: Tony _hadn't_ caused her son's death. Ultron had. But Ultron was gone and she wanted someone to blame for the completely senseless way her son had died, a kid that sounded like he would have a positive impact on the world, and so she settled for the man who built the robot and was still in reach. It was understandable - but it didn't make it right. There was no telling how much that lashing out had lead Tony to agreeing with Ross' terms (especially after Clint _knew_ how much pleasure Tony had taken in trouncing the hell out of him about Bruce six years before, it'd been the talk of S.H.I.E.L.D. for a week afterwards) but it had obviously had _some_ form of impact considering how Nat had described his attitude at the meeting - unusually silent, swinging into near-confrontational. Tony could be erratic, more than anyone on the team, but that level of emotional veering was unusual even for him. He'd reached the end of his long, expensive rope, hit the point where he'd thrown up his hands and decided that he clearly wasn't doing good anymore, so it was time for someone else to try. Clint could understand that viewpoint, but he couldn't agree with it.

"And if you hadn't been able to make your own decisions..." Laura murmured, hand clenching involuntarily on his so that he let go of his mug and took her other as well, watching her closely, "we wouldn't have Nat. Or Lila. Or even Wanda."

"You're right, we wouldn't." The circumstances behind each had varied, of course, but what with one thing or another, all three of them had come to the farm and the family because of something he'd chosen to do when other people were telling him not to. He'd always challenged the rules, forged his own path, even in the Forces and especially with the agency. "And if Fury hadn't been willing to listen to what we wanted and work with us, I might not've been with S.H.I.E.L.D. at all."

Her eyes met his and she tightened her grip on his hands for a moment, he returned the gesture, and then she stood to move to the sink and begin scrubbing up a few dishes that had been left from lunch. "What are you going to do?"

Clint couldn't do much but throw his hands in the air at his uselessness to the team now. "What _can_ I do? I guess I could go out there and talk to them, but it's a personal decision. I told them I was out last year and I meant it, and I told Nat again today. Everyone not signing will still be able to live in the compound since Stark owns it outright so they don't need house space, and he'll keep paying grocery bills or whatever as long as they're willing to let him."

"So you don't have to make some sort of formal appearance? An I'm-definitely-not-signing this meeting?"

"Nat said I just don't turn up and don't put my name on. Sounded like no one really argued about me. Looks like being the non-powered member of the team that everyone forgets about has a couple of advantages."

Laura paused in her scrubbing, water running into the sink in front of her as she turned to watch him with those all-too-seeing brown eyes. "You know that's not true. They value you - and you care about them."

Once more, he sighed. "Yeah... I know. They're still my mess. But this isn't something I can help them on - it's something they've got to decide for themselves. At least no one might die because of this."

"Mmm." Laura bent over the frying pan she was scouring, quiet for a few seconds, before posing the question he'd been expecting for most of the conversation. "You're still going to be there for our vacation, right?"

He could hear the question she carefully wasn't voicing underneath her actual words, and his heart sank. "Hey." Clint pushed his chair back from the table and moved to the sink, turning Laura around to face him and slipping his arms around her waist. Hers went automatically over his shoulders, and he didn't care that the water dripping from her fingers was making a cold spot on his flannel shirt. "There's really _not_ anything I can do, so there's no point in me going except to check on them. They're adults, mostly, at least, they can handle this on their own. Might argue some about it, but I shouldn't have to use the Dad Voice on them. It'll be done by then anyway. I can't promise I won't think about it sometimes, but I'll be there. You can count on that."

A brief smile flickered over her face, still troubled but accepting of the fact that her husband meant what he said. Leaning forward, she rested her head against his shoulder and neck, her arms tightening subtly, almost clinging to him like he was on the verge of walking out the door to another mission, a thought that made his heart ache. They'd had enough partings in their lives - it was time and past he stopped giving her cause to worry about them. "Love you more than anything, Laura," he whispered into her ear, and her arms tightened just that little bit more.

They stayed that way for several seconds, leaning into each other and just paying attention to how good it felt to be with each other, knowing their support was there and wouldn't fall. He'd really lucked out when he'd met Laura - she'd put up with so much through their relationship, and deserved so much better than he could give her. Eventually she pulled back, pressing a kiss to his jawline as he returned one to her forehead, and gave him a small, brave smile that he was both incredibly proud of and also somewhat heartsick over. She couldn't hide her feelings from him, but the fact that she felt the need to hide them at all... she shouldn't have to do that, and it was the life he had chosen that made her try. "It's been a long day - why don't you dish up some ice cream for everyone, join the kids in the rec room, and I'll come in when I'm done with these pans?"

Clint easily recognized it as a distraction tactic, but for the moment he was perfectly willing to be distracted. It _had_ been a long day, he was more tired than he should have been, and spending time with his children sounded like the perfect way to blot the unhappy thoughts and memories from his brain until after he had some more sleep under his belt. He smiled at Laura, leaning forward to quickly kiss her once more. "Sounds great. You don't want me to help you?"

"Not this time. You need this right now." That earned her another kiss, longer, for how well she knew him and how easily she could tell what he needed to hear. When she pulled back this time, her smile was still small but much more genuine. "I've got this. Dish up and head out there."

"Yes, ma'am." Laura turned back to the sink (her hands nearly dry) to finish the pots and pans waiting, and Clint moved to the table once more to grab the coffee pot. He looked at it, then at the mug, and raised it to his mouth to finish off the brew inside.

"Don't drink from the pot, Clint," Laura said without even turning around. His shoulders hunched as he poured the last of it into his mug, then went to the freezer to remove the ice cream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time: explosions. Now, trivia!
> 
> -I have looked up so much ridiculous info about Iowa because of Clint. Did you know vodka is the most popular alcoholic beverage in Iowa (after beer and wine) and that there's actually a brand called Hawkeye Vodka? Though it's made in Missouri. There was also research into the highway system, the school year (for the last chapter), and locations of Super Walmarts. Semi-related, the Nissan Armada was one of the top-rated SUVs of 2015 and I'm biased towards Japanese cars so that's what they got. Because there is no way they can fit all the family in the truck or the fairly small car you can see hanging out at the edge of the farmhouse yard in AoU.  
> -The kids are Cooper Thomas Barton and Lila Emily Barton, with their middle names taken from Laura's parents. Since Nate's got a significant middle and I buy into the Family Theme Naming I figured the other two kids would have significant middles as well, and Clint wouldn't use his parents' names.  
> -Lego are awesome. Nothing else, just Lego are awesome.  
> -In my headcanon, Clint joined the Army straight out of high school and Special Forces when he got old enough (minimum age is twenty, college degree recommended by not required and we all know Clint is just That Fucking Good a shot). He got medical discharge at twenty-four from the previously-mentioned explosion that took most of his hearing and also gave him some pretty bad burns. He then went to work for the brother of a friend who owned a construction company, which is where he learned a lot of the home repair stuff.  
> -It's canon that Fury and Ross know each other and have encountered each other in work capacity to some degree from the _Fury's Big Week_ series of comics, and "The Consultant" short film shows S.H.I.E.L.D. is more than willing to mess with him and don't seem to hold him in high regard. In real life, it's not all that uncommon for different arms of various protective groups (FBI, CIA, Army, Navy, etc) to collaborate on missions where they both (or all) have jurisdiction and reason to be there, so adding S.H.I.E.L.D. to that mix seemed entirely logical to me. And given that Clint can and has completely disobeyed Fury on at least one and probably several occasions (see: recruiting Nat), I _cannot_ believe he'd like Ross _at all_.  
>  -I initially had _Lilo & Stitch_ as the movie the kids watched, but switched it to _Finding Nemo_ after seeing _Finding Dory_ with my own dad for Father's Day. That movie is _adorable_ and everyone needs to see it, but more specifically it really is one of those movies anyone can watch and appreciate no matter their age and it's about family finding each other and reuniting. I wanted that note going into what we all know is coming.  
>  -The thing I liked the most about this section was the potential to go back and examine the rest of the MCU for parallels and influences for why the fallout of the Accords turned out like they did. There are, admittedly, a lot more of them in this part than I initially thought there would be, but things just kept occurring to me and I had to put them in.  
> -In the film, Vision says that it's been eight years since Tony debuted as Iron Man, but that's actually wrong. _Iron Man_ came out eight years ago, but with the sorted-out timeline that's official MCU canon since they piled large chunks of three movies into one week, Tony officially outs himself as Iron Man in late October 2010; the Expo in _IM2_ , all of _Thor_ in New Mexico, and the US-based portions of _Incredible Hulk_ happen six months later; and Cap is found in Greenland one year after that, barely _two weeks_ before the Battle of New York, so Vision's internal continuity is screwing up. Bad android, no biscuit.  
>  -The reference for not having Nat in the family if Clint had obeyed orders is obvious, but the reason Lila's on the list is because he got hurt disobeying his handler and Laura got pregnant while he was on recuperation leave. Wanda's there as well because, while I love Hawkdad and his not!daughter to _pieces_ , it took him three years to bring _Captain Freaking America_ to the farm. There had to be more behind Clint bringing Wanda home and at least one person told him not to trust her with his family's safety. (This is in the writing queue, I promised a friend months ago I'd do it).  
>  -Yep, the drinking-from-the-pot thing is straight out of Fraction. _Why the hell not_. Though Laura has more manners than her husband.
> 
> Thanks for sitting through all my long-ass spiels, and I'll see you next time for Part Five!


	5. Part Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh this one was so much easier to do than part four. _So much easier_ I am so happy about that. Part four was a slog, this chugged along pretty regularly until the end. I can't guarantee it'll continue like this, and I'm no longer going to hold myself to a once-a-week upload schedule, but knowing what I want to have happen in each part and, more importantly, where it's going on the way to the ending really does help. I knew part four was going to deal with the bombshell of the Accords (and the smaller bombshell of Peggy's death), but aside from the first section pretty much all I had planned was... "they talk." So it took awhile.
> 
> But anyway, here we are, part five is up. The roller coaster has started on the plunge, kids, and now we're all just hanging on for the ride. Thanks to everyone who read that last mondo-dose of words, and I promise you this doesn't have as many as the last one did (even though it's still over 7500). Thanks especially to everyone who left kudos, and to swanpride, Cerusee, ChocolateOctopus, and hyunbiased for leaving lovely comments. I'm just grateful I didn't put you all off this story entirely with over ten thousand words discussing politics and current events in the MCU!
> 
> As always, if you see anything that I missed in proofreading (spelling, typos, awkward word choice, whatever - except the French, you'll see), please let me know so I can correct it. Soundtrack for this section is "Lydia" by Highly Suspect for the first part and "Kingdom Come" by the Civil Wars for after the break. Thank you for tuning back in, and enjoy!

Three days, a lot of sleep, ice cream, coffee, and a trip to a nearby petting zoo did much to restore Clint's sense of equilibrium with the world at large. He was able to think about the team and the Accords and the impact they would have on each other in his private moments, mostly when he was working on the new extension to the house. It was part of why he did so much home repair work – he was one of those people that couldn't sit still, couldn't be inactive, rest and relax and just let things go by. It was why he'd been such a terrible medical patient in his younger days, and why he still could be if he'd gotten an injury that required a lot of bed rest, so much so that Fury had more than once kicked him out of S.H.I.E.L.D. medical facilities after the complaints of the staff there. It was why he'd been found so often performing maintenance on his own equipment during his time with the agency even when there were plenty of technicians that were paid to do that for him, and part of why (no matter how many times he told Laura he'd stop) he kept ripping the house apart. When his hands were moving, when he was actually accomplishing something, Clint was able to mentally tune out most of the work and let his thoughts drift to whatever was currently on his mind, helping him to sort through his thoughts and feelings on any number of things over the years. He just couldn't think properly if his hands didn't have some occupation. 

It was good that the new extension was so involved, because the Accords gave him a lot to think over. He'd bowed to the inevitable - and Laura's demand - and hired a local construction firm to come the week after Nate's birthday and the Avengers had left to help pour the concrete for the foundation and put up the basic framework. Sure, he _could_ do all of that, and had in the past, but this project was on a scale that even a workaholic like himself couldn't perform alone, at least not with any sort of speed. With the team starting to make more frequent visits to the farm, it was for the best to get things finished as fast as he could, and now that the bombshell of the Accords had hit and at least Sam and Steve were stepping down it seemed like an even better idea to give them somewhere to camp out besides the compound. Still, having too many people hanging around the farm for extended periods of time only made it more likely that there would be a slip-up no matter how careful everyone was, so once the workers had the framework up, Clint had bought the rest of the materials wholesale through their company and said he'd finish up the rest himself. He'd have to hire an electrician to come out and wire the place up correctly when everything was a lot closer to being finished, but there was plenty of work to do before then.

He let his mind drift as he laid floors, raised walls, screwed and measured and sawed, sometimes with the help of his kids. The Accords were meant to do something good, and he could vaguely see the point the politicians were raising, but his mind kept circling back around to the fact that they seemed to be blaming the team for things outside their control. The Chitauri would still have invaded the planet, HYDRA would have been able to shoot off the Project Insight helicarriers and kill several million people in the course of a day, Rumlow would have escaped with a biological weapon. Okay, _maybe_ Ultron, but considering no one had known what that staff was capable of, that was more a misstep of sheer idiocy and hubris on Tony's part and definitely not active malice. Nat's little speech to the Congressional board two years previously (caught forever on the glory of YouTube, and how she hated that) was just as true now as it had been then - but he had to wonder if the US had subtly encouraged the Accords behind the scenes almost in retribution for her telling them to go screw themselves, because the team didn't have to listen.

_You think you don't?_ he could almost hear them whisper in the back of his mind. _Let's see how far you get with that now..._

Still, in terms of the team itself, the Accords as they stood at that moment weren't really that unfair, and Clint could admit that his and Steve's reticence to sign them came mostly from seeing a lot of possible futures of misuse of power that they couldn't be sure would happen. Nat definitely saw them too, but was willing to work within the system to try and improve it or manipulate it to their advantage while they (and Sam) saw the system as inherently flawed to begin with. He wasn't entirely sure if Tony had seen them at all or if he'd weighed the options and considered them less important, not even after Tony had called him. 

It had been a pretty short conversation, Tony of course being Tony Stark and always having ten thousand projects going at once that needed his attention, but he'd wanted to check up on his old teammate and sound him out a little on his opinion on the whole mess. Clint had managed to bite his tongue and not devolve into an extended rant about Ross and how politics as a whole was absolutely fucked up, which meant he'd been able to hear the weariness in Tony's voice more and more easily the longer they talked. They'd never been the closest of the team but Tony was still his friend, and it wasn't at all hard to tell that he was driving himself into the ground over this and probably a lot of other things as well. Clint didn't bring up Mrs. Spencer, but he did make it very clear that once everything was over Tony needed to come out and visit again, take as much of a vacation as he ever allowed himself, maybe even do that electrical work on the new extension so Clint didn't have to pay anyone. He hadn't really received an acceptance on the offer, Tony giving his usual meandering, distracting verbal two-step about seeing what happened, but when they'd hung up Clint could at least be sure of the fact that Tony's agreeing to the Accords wasn't a decision he'd come to lightly. He honestly believed this was necessary, and while Clint couldn't agree with him he could at least respect that conviction.

Nat called twice more, fairly short conversations augmented by texts as she was suddenly swept up in planning two international visits on peaceful terms and was busy getting all of that arranged, and Sam called once with an even briefer update about the details of Peggy Carter's funeral. He'd considered attending for a moment or two since he was one of the most well-known members of S.H.I.E.L.D. throughout its entire history but had quickly opted out since he hadn't really known her even if he'd firmly respected her, not to mention the upcoming family trip. Steve himself didn't call but Clint honestly hadn't expected him to, and he just sent him a couple of texts letting him know he was around if he needed him and if Steve wanted to get away for awhile they could make it work. The much more disturbing lack of communication came from Wanda. After everything he, Laura, Steve, and Sam had talked about during their visit, he'd been trying off and on to get her on the phone but she hadn't returned his calls or texts. He'd been about to have Nat force her on the phone before the Accords hit and that plan had fallen to pieces in the wake of everyone being so worked up over this whole thing, but he was more anxious about her than before after Nat described her quiet during and since the meeting about them. Once they were officially signed he'd get one of the team to _tie_ her to a phone if necessary, because this was getting ridiculous. He kept Laura updated about his attempts to contact Wanda, but there simply wasn't much to tell and both of them were concerned, to say the least.

The day of the funeral and the signing of the Accords started off as another normal one for the Barton family. Waking up the kids was slightly less of a chore as they'd burned off a lot of energy running around the small more-or-less-local zoo the day before and slept early and hard, and they'd gotten Cooper and Lila into their uniforms and driven them to soccer practice, both kids being members of teams in the summer rec league. Laura's friend Hannah had agreed to babysit Nate for the morning so she and Clint could get the last of their errands for the trip done child-free and hopefully faster, including getting the SUV serviced. Laura was reading a book as they sat in the waiting room while the oil was changed and the tires rotated, and Clint pulled out his phone and began scrolling through it, ignoring the ubiquitous TV mounted to the wall and tuned to one of the sports channels.

Nat had started texting him before the sun had risen on his morning, having left the evening before for London to be ready for the funeral first thing. The UN had rather graciously agreed to delay the official signing once they heard Peggy Carter's funeral was going to be the same day so that anyone who wanted to could attend both, as she had been well-known in diplomatic circles as well as the world of espionage and more people than just the Avengers wanted to pay their respects. Clint couldn't help but feel that that was also a tactic to beckon Rogers into signing on, trying to show him that they could compromise and would be willing to work with him, see how they're doing that now, but even if there were ulterior motives at least the gesture was nice. 

The funeral had begun at nine in the morning, London time, and Nat had started texting as she'd gotten ready. He scrolled through the messages she'd left him again, wondering exactly where she was now, since she'd been planning to take a jet straight to Vienna after the funeral and wouldn't have a lot of time in between. If all they were doing was putting a bunch of names on a piece of paper, that wouldn't really take long and maybe she'd be back at her hotel, but depending on how many speeches about world peace and international cooperation there would be, she could be stuck there until after nightfall.

Better her than him.

_Nat (02:37:43): I shouldn't feel so awkward wearing this much black, should I? I wear it almost every mission but it's still weird :/_

_Nat (02:55:23): At the cathedral. Sam up front waiting for Steve. Everyone's already weepy :(_

_Nat (02:58:12): Found a seat in back. Place is decorated nicely. She would've liked it_

_Nat (04:26:37): SHARON CARTER WAS HER GRANDNIECE HOW DID SHE HIDE THIS FROM US damn you Nick I thought we had this discussion_

_Nat (04:27:19): Ceremony was beautiful though. Very talented children's choir, good eulogies and memoirs. Place is emptying out, going to talk to Steve and then catch the jet_

_Nat (05:06:41): On the jet to Vienna. Signing in 2 hours. Wish me luck :)_

When he'd woken up about an hour after her last text, he'd sent her a general response wishing her luck and asking why she hadn't sat with Sam and Steve, but as of yet had received no response back. He wasn't all that surprised; she'd have been swept up by UN security personnel immediately after landing in Vienna and likely been stuck talking to some liaison or whatever as they tried to prepare her for what would happen in the signing, having to pass through all the security barriers and searches, and if she was lucky grabbing something to eat. She'd text him back when everything was through, probably with some comment about how boring it was to sit there while politicians droned on like they were being paid by the word.

That was what everyone thought would happen. The reality turned out to be something none of them had expected.

"Clint," Laura gasped beside him, and he immediately tensed and looked up at the worry and breathlessness of her voice, but she wasn't looking at him, or even at the book she'd been reading. Instead, her shocked gaze was locked on the television he'd tuned out when they'd walked in ten minutes before, growing more horrified every moment. "Look."

He did, and his phone fell with a clatter. The early morning program that had been talking about how the current season was going in baseball had disappeared, instead replaced with a special update from CNN and a constant news crawl along the bottom of the screen. He took in the plume of smoke climbing from a building made almost entirely of glass, one his trained eye told him was the remnant of a much more powerful explosion that had mostly dissipated, the area surrounded by flashing red lights, yellow tape, metal barricades, and various first response teams like firefighters and police officers. Flames still licked through the building, multiple hoses trained on them to try and put them out, but he judged it would be difficult to suppress them if they'd burned this long and the responders would likely just have to let them die naturally. His brain could only process what the location caption and news title was above the crawl after he'd put all of that together because he just couldn't believe it without the pieces in place.

_TERRORIST BOMBING AT VIENNA INTERNATIONAL CENTER. 17 CONFIRMED DEAD, ALMOST 80 INJURED._

Clint didn't even comprehend telling his body to move: one moment he was in his chair, frozen in horror, the next he was sprinting outside at his top speed, phone in hand even though he didn't remember picking it up, slamming into the door with barely any recognition that the obstacle was there as he unlocked the phone. He vaguely heard Laura say something about his sister being on a work trip to Vienna to the person staffing the desk as he ran but it didn't matter what anyone else thought; the only thing on his mind was Nat. The contacts page lit up as he bolted a few hundred feet into the bare lot next to the mechanic and he punched Nat's name almost hard enough to break the screen, holding the phone up to his ear and listening impatiently to the ring. It droned on, and on, and on - and she didn't pick up. The call went to her voicemail, and Clint immediately hung up, switching to the texting function and typing furiously.

_Clint (09:14:56): NAT CALL ME CALL ME NOW RIGHT NOW_

He was dimly aware he was pacing in a rapid circle as he switched back to the phone functions, hitting Call again and returning it to his ear. Once more the series of six long rings played, once more her voice mail picked up, once more he hung up and called again. And again. And again after that, and then sent another text. Laura joined him at some point he wasn't even aware of, standing back a few feet so he didn't run her over with his pacing, watching him with naked concern on her face as he tried over and over to make contact.

Several minutes, at least twelve phone calls, and four panicked texts later... there was finally an answer.

"If I di-"

" _Are you alright?!_ " he practically yelled into the phone, making Laura jump and vaguely surprising himself at how loud he was but he really didn't give a shit right then.

"I'm fine, Clint."

" _Don't lie to me._ "

"I'm _fine_. A couple of bruises and my ears were ringing for awhile, but that stopped about twenty minutes ago. I promise, I'm okay."

He sighed heavily, letting his head drop into his free hand, all the tension going out of his shoulders as the panic and worry left his body like he was a puppet with the strings cut. "God, don't _scare_ me like that."

"I'm sorry, but what was I supposed to do? We needed someone here to represent the team at the signing and Tony was busy, Vision didn't think the UN would be comfortable with him, and they wanted Rhodey to make a good will appearance in Lagos. I promise, I'm fine."

"Then you need to _call_ us next time and te-"

With absolutely no warning, the phone was suddenly gone from his hand, and Clint was left blinking at where the device had just been. Laura, completely unwilling to be left out of this conversation, had grabbed it from his hand and had it to her ear, an absolutely furious Ultimate Mom look on her face as she started in on a tirade in near-perfect French. She certainly remembered more of her language courses from school than he did; he hadn't started really working on foreign languages until he really needed to with S.H.I.E.L.D., and for some reason Spanish was still next to impossible for him. His French, though, was more than good enough to follow along with Laura's rant.

" _Natalia Alianovna Romanova the next time a thing like this to happen you are going to call us FIRST, do you understand me?! I am NOT going to have my children come to me and ask me what happened to Auntie Nat and why we did not tell them it!_ " She paused, still furious but apparently listening to the few words Nat was able to get out before kicking off again. " _They're at the practice but if that has happened TWO HOURS BEFORE it is true some parents there will have heard it and be talking about it and they know who you are and what you do and they KNOW ABOUT THE PAPERS! And it's your safety, we want to- You are not 'Laura wait' me, I do NOT want to hear about you might being hurt on a story on the news! You're family, and family TELLS EACH of what happens to them! I do not care what time it is, CALL US. If you're hurt we want to KNOW it!_ "

"Can I have my phone back?"

"Honey, I'm not done. _Do you understand me Nat?! I will not letting you go until you agree!_ "

Whatever Nat said, it was enough to soften the glare Laura was giving to the air in front of her face a bit though it didn't erase it at all, and she tucked the arm not holding the phone across her body in an approximation of her normal take-no-shit stance that someone who'd earned her ire would receive in person. “ _All of us know Clint is impossible for some things_ \- Honey, not yet - _but even he has learned long ago to tell me about what has happened to him and I THOUGHT you had, too. Do you_ promise _?_ ” She fell quiet again as Nat spoke, slowly relaxing a little more although she was obviously still worried, and finally she nodded, switching back to English. “All right. Just don't do that again, and come home as soon as you can so Cooper and Lila can see that you're really all right. Call us in about... five hours so they can talk to you, we'll explain it before then, but they'll want to hear your voice. Be safe, all right?” She waited a moment more, then nodded and held the phone out to her husband.

Clint took it back and held it to his ear, watching his wife who stayed only a couple of feet from him while he talked. “For the record, Nat, I'm on her side.”

“Oh, shut up Clint, we all know you're horrible when you're injured.”

“Was that was you said to her? Maybe I was, but I learned that lesson _way_ in the past now and I always called her or had you or Fury call her when I got hurt.” Laura nodded briefly, not interrupting but agreeing with his statement; she'd agreed to be kept in the dark about a lot of Clint's doings with S.H.I.E.L.D. when he'd joined up, but one thing she'd refused to accept was not knowing when her husband had been hurt. The specific details of how he'd gotten his injuries could wait until he was home to tell her, but she'd demanded to know as soon as it was safe for someone to make contact with her what had happened, how much blood he'd lost, and how long he'd have to stay under the care of the medicos. After the first couple of times of delaying telling her so as not to worry her, Clint - _and_ Fury – had gotten the hint. “Really, though, you're okay?” he asked, pulling the phone down and hitting the Speaker button so Laura could also listen and talk if she wanted to.

“Really. They just finished checking me out not long ago, and they said I was as good as could be expected. We were a few floors up, and most of us managed to get under the tables before the explosion.” 

“How did you know?” Laura asked.

“Most of us?” was what Clint latched onto.

Nat sighed, the heavy one she only used when everything had genuinely gone horribly and she was worn beyond belief – physically good she might be, Clint would be willing to trust the EMTs on that, but it had been an incredibly long day for her and it sounded like it might get worse. Sort of the motto for the last few days, really. “T'Challa, the prince of Wakanda, was standing by the windows while King T'Chaka gave his address. He spotted the news truck the bomb had apparently been hidden in, realized what it was, and yelled for everyone to get down as he started sprinting for his father. He gave enough warning for most people to duck, but he and King T'Chaka were caught in the blast. T'Chaka didn't make it.”

Laura's hand went to her mouth, eyes widening with shock. “Oh no...” 

They'd seen the king on the news a few times since the disaster in Lagos, and even though he was one of the strongest voices for some sort of regulation over the Avengers he'd seemed well-spoken and overall fairly reasonable, at least as much as one could be when reading a prepared statement in front of a bunch of news cameras. Nobody, Clint included, could blame him for being angry over the loss of a large number of the members of his peace delegation just when the country was starting to come out of its isolationism, and he hadn't been calling for Wanda's arrest, even though he'd been one of the ones to call her actions irresponsible. Losing him before the ink even had a chance to touch the paper might make everything so much worse than it could have been... “And T'Challa?”

“Battered, but alive. In shock. He really shouldn't have survived that, but maybe since he's younger... They seemed very close. He's taking this hard.”

“I don't doubt it.” Laura had been fairly close to her parents before they both passed away – peacefully, thankfully – unlike Clint, so she had more sympathy for losing a father than he did. “What's going to happen now, are they rescheduling?”

“No one's decided yet. This was more a formality than anything, everyone's already ratified it in their own countries, so they might be in effect everywhere even without the full signing. It doesn't really matter right now, everyone's more concerned with catching Barnes-”

“ _Barnes?!_ ”

“You didn't hear? It was on the news, I thought you saw-”

“We ran out to call you when we saw the update, we didn't stay for all the details when you were in a _bombing_ , you can't think Barnes was involved in this, no one's seen him for _two years_ Nat-”

“There's evidence,” she cut across Clint's rant, silencing him for the moment. “One of the security cameras caught him leaving the scene; he was clearly trying to stay unnoticed, but he slipped and they were able to recognize his face. The JTTF called in everyone they could and they're forming squads to go after him now; they'll find him before he can do something like this again.”

Something about that didn't feel right to Clint, but he couldn't put his finger on what it was. While most of his hunches had played out exactly as he'd thought in the past, not all of them had, and since he didn't know James Barnes at all and he wasn't on the scene, it was much more likely than not that this was one of the times he'd get it wrong. “Will you be going out with them?”

“Not unless they ask me to. That's what the Accords are doing, after all, and it's best to play by the rules for the moment. And even if he is enhanced, a SWAT team should be able to take him down if they can catch him.”

“Yeah,” Clint sighed, running his hand over his face. “If they can. Remember how Cap fought off a _Quinjet_?”

“I know, I know. But this is the best chance they've got – and if they need the big guns, I'm not it. They're calling in Rhodey to ask him to help; no matter what Barnes can do, the War Machine armor can top him.”

“Rhodey, not Stark?”

“He signed as an active non-combatant. Basically that means emergency situations only, and so far this isn't one. The active Avenger will be enough.”

Laura sighed herself, stepping forward and leaning into Clint's side, where he put his arm around her waist to hold her. “I hope so. No one else needs to be hurt over this.”

“You're right. Let's hope no one does.” There was a pause on the other end of the phone and Clint and Laura looked at each other, both worried but unable to do much of anything almost halfway around the world. “T'Challa's sitting by himself and staring into space; I should go talk to him.”

“All right. Take care of yourself and remember to call us later so the kids will be reassured.”

“Does two your time sound good?”

“We'll make it work,” Clint said, squeezing Laura a little tighter. “You _stay_ all right.”

“I will. Talk to you soon.” The phone gave an electronic beep as the call disconnected.

“Bye,” Clint said to thin air, still slightly stunned; turning a little, he took Laura into his arms as she stepped into him, both of them taking comfort from the other, finding reassurance and stable mental footing again after a huge scare. “She's okay,” he whispered, turning his head to kiss her temple as she gripped his shirt. “She's all right, I can tell when she's lying.”

“You're shaking.”

She was right; he was, and he hadn't noticed it before then as his worry for Nat overwhelmed him. Concentrating on his body even as he held tight to Laura, Clint managed to slow his breathing and reduce his heart rate down to normal levels, let go of much of the tension in his muscles, and stop the small quiver in his fingers that betrayed his apprehension and actual terror. “Sorry," he breathed into her hair as he slowly relaxed, repeating to himself that she was okay, she was alive, she'd call again. "She's been through a lot without me there to bail her out, but now I'm not even working that job so I can't go help her if she needs it... I don't like this feeling.”

Laura nodded, not pulling away from him yet. “Now you know how I felt every time you would go out and I would get one of those calls.”

“I know,” he said quietly. “I'm sorry.”

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

Both of them were too used to sudden danger to not be able to finish their errands for the day, though they were more subdued and didn't speak all that much as they finished with the mechanic, the dry cleaners, and the post office. Some of Laura's fears were realized when they returned to the park and the practice fields to pick up Cooper and Lila: news of the bombing had spread, some of the adults and even a few older kids talking about it as they gathered their things together to go back to their homes, and the children had clearly heard about it even if they mostly ignored it. Having years of practice with S.H.I.E.L.D., Clint had schooled his face into a more natural expression and gone to retrieve his kids while Laura stayed with the car; he managed to avoid being sucked in to any of the discussions that were happening on that or several other more innocent topics by the simple expediency of saying they still had to go pick up Nate. Cooper and Lila were both quiet as they walked back to the SUV, Lila gripping her father's hand tight and both of them as obviously troubled as he was inside.

“Daddy, is Auntie Nat okay?” Lila whispered as they walked, knowing she couldn't reveal Auntie Nat's real profession and identity but unable to keep quiet. Cooper looked up at his father as well, waiting for the answer, and Clint was momentarily diverted by how strong and amazing his children were. Most kids couldn't have kept quiet about all they did for as long as they had. _They got that from their mother._

He kept his own voice low as they walked, squeezing Lila's hand and giving Coop a reassuring look. “She's okay, I promise. We talked to her on the phone.” Both of them continued to watch him, needing more information, and he pressed on since there wasn't anyone in easy hearing range for the moment. “She's a little banged up, but she's all right. The ambulance people looked at her and told her she was good. She's gonna call you two later but she's had a very long day, so you can't speak to her too long so she can get some sleep.”

“Okay,” Lila said as Cooper nodded, clutching his and his sister's equipment bags, worry still obvious in the way his knuckles tightened on the nylon straps. Clint sighed to himself; he'd willingly chosen his life, but the one thing he regretted about it more than anything was the effect it had on his family. Not being able to see them, the secrets he had to keep from them, the secrets _they_ had to keep from the world around them, finding ways to explain his absences and what, exactly, he did for work... The kids had grown up with it, were used to it and saw it as a fact of life, and Laura had knowingly agreed to it when she'd accepted his proposal after Fury had approached him with the offer to join, but that didn't mean it wasn't hard. And now with all the Avengers stuff it was even worse, since even in a relatively small town in Iowa, people were paying attention to the superhero team that regularly saved the world. He'd been very lucky so far that his image hadn't gotten out much since news cameras weren't able to get to the scene while disasters were going on, and he'd retired before the really long-term focus had kicked in with the aftermath of Sokovia, but they were still his mess and he couldn't stop being worried about them. Nor could the rest of his family, which he was both proud of and very concerned about. Lila and Cooper were getting older every day and Cooper was already paying attention to the news of his own free will, while Lila absorbed what was going on around her very easily and didn't often forget anything. More people they knew from their dad's work life meant more people to worry about and more _opportunities_ to worry about them – hence more opportunities for them to slip up and let the family's secrets spill to their friends, schoolmates, or adults around town. He wasn't exactly sure what to _do_ about it beyond having another talk with them, but he'd have to figure out something soon.

In fact he still wasn't sure how they'd figured out the Accords were a thing that was happening or that Nat was going to be there, though he suspected Cooper had run across it in his allotted internet time the day after Nat had called. He and Laura had sat the kids down and explained to them what it meant, for the members of the team and of the world as well, but Lila had still been obviously confused by all the politics and debates around it. Cooper had understood more of what was going on and seemed mostly troubled by Steve and Sam not wanting to stay on the team and continue defending the world, not really getting _why_ they wouldn't want to continue being heroes even with the new rules. It hadn't been easy to explain their (and his) apprehension about the situation, and Clint doubted he'd succeeded at getting it across. His son had been quieter than normal for the couple of days since the talk, culminating in this day – and the bombing. Even Lila had known how Auntie Nat was in danger, and since she was her favorite person in the world, she was having a hard time holding it together.

Lunch was subdued and quick, just sandwiches and cut fruit pulled out of the fridge with little to no clean up, and Clint drank an entire pot of coffee between then and when Nat called to try and keep his mind sharp and drown his worry. It didn't exactly work. But Laura's phone rang just after two and Lila snatched it off the counter faster than anyone else could grab it, answering and frantically begging her aunt to reassure her that she was okay. Clint and Laura left the kids to it, settled on the couch in the living room, him with the mug with the last of his coffee in it and her with an iced tea that she'd discreetly stirred a small shot of bourbon into. The day hadn't been very physically active but the mental and emotional strain was higher than Clint had expected it to be, and he was wishing he dared repeat his coffee and vodka stunt this early in the day. “Was it like this every time I got hurt?” he asked quietly as he let his head fall onto Laura's shoulder, closing his eyes and trying to muffle the kids' chatter from the other room.

She set her drink down and rested her head on top of his, laying her hand on his leg and rubbing soothingly. “Mostly not. Usually by the time I got the call, you were in the hands of the medics or already in the hospital, and they knew what had happened to you and how long it would take to fix everything. There wasn't all this uncertainty and worry hanging over everything. I think that's what's making this so bad – we can't _do_ anything about it, and we don't know if there's going to be any kind of resolution soon.”

“And she was alone on this one,” Clint said, taking Laura's hand and squeezing. “Unless she's pulling undercover work, she's always got backup who can take care of her, and she knows better than to get into anything crazy while she's undercover. Or at least she does now,” he added, remembering a couple of incidents from their early missions – one of which had led to him almost not being able to have children. “But she couldn't defend herself from this and Steve or Wanda or Vision wasn't there to pull her out of the rubble when the smoke cleared. I don't think she even had any weapons on her.”

“As if that would stop Nat.” His lips pulled back in a small involuntary smile at Laura's words; no, being unarmed really wouldn't stop her if she was determined. Which she always was. “But you're right – it's the fact that she didn't have any options of her own this time that makes this so much worse. A mission, or any kind of assignment, she would have been prepared for something going wrong, but this was supposed to be a peaceful meeting. Everything was settling down, people were behaving like adults, and then...”

“Boom.”

“Yeah. Boom.”

“And she thinks we're overreacting.” Clint sighed, raising his mug to drain the last of his coffee but not moving away from Laura or opening his eyes. “I'm gonna call Gary and Art, tell them I can't make it tonight. I'm not gonna be able to concentrate on cards with all this shit going on.” He'd had a standing invitation for years now to the weekly poker game that a few of their neighbors had thrown together, and since retiring he'd taken them up on the invitation much more often than not. Usually won, too, since he was good at hiding his emotions thanks to his S.H.I.E.L.D. training, so the group probably wouldn't be too upset that he wasn't there to clean everyone out for an extra week on top of the vacation.

Laura nodded against him. “Are you going to tell them why?”

He considered for a moment, then shrugged a bit. “Probably dance around it. It's getting really close to the coincidence line to say Nat was in Vienna on a business trip so we're freaked out about her, but they've known about her for years and met her a couple of times... I can always say trip preparations, I guess. We've gotta be forgetting something important that'll come back to bite us in the ass.”

“Probably, but right now that's not really important.” She removed the mug from his hand and set it on the end table, settling more snugly against him with the distinct implication that she didn't want to move for a long time. Not that he was arguing. The sound of Cooper's voice on the phone drifted from the sunroom, Lila occasionally adding a word in in a louder tone to make sure Auntie Nat heard it on the other end of the line, while Nate burbled to himself and pushed a stuffed lion across the bottom of the playpen from off to the left in front of the fireplace. The house was peaceful and soothing, and right now that was something that all the family desperately needed after their fear for one of their members. “You gonna go out and work on the extension some more?” she asked, well acquainted with his normal coping mechanisms.

But Clint shook his head. “Nah... can't concentrate. I'll get back to it tomorrow.”

She gave a small hum of acceptance in her throat, not wanting to move to even nod. “Board game and pizza day, then?”

He smiled, raising their joined hands from his leg to softly kiss her knuckles. “Sounds good to me.”

“Pizza always sounds good to you.”

“And I'm not apologizing for it, 'cause it's always good.”

The voices from the sunroom fell silent and Clint went just a little more alert, paying attention to where the children were to make sure they weren't getting into trouble: Lila's lighter steps moved very little and there was a small _huff_ of cushions compressing as she threw herself onto the padded bench in the sunroom, but Cooper's heavier strides crossed the kitchen and approached the couch his parents were sitting on. Clint and Laura unwound themselves enough to face him like a pair of forty-something adults and not lovesick teenagers; Cooper, used to his parents' antics, didn't even blink as he handed his mother her phone back. “Auntie Nat said she'd call you tomorrow.”

Clint blinked in surprise at that statement, not bothering to hide it from his son. “She hung up without wanting to talk to us?”

Cooper nodded. “She said she was really tired and she was going to bed. She sounded it, too, she kept yawning as we spoke to her.” He paused, eyes dropping to the floor and clearly working up the courage to say something, before he looked back up at his father. “You've been in explosions, Dad.” Cooper's normally quiet voice, already low, was almost a whisper now. “She's really okay, right? She's not just saying it to make us not worry?”

“Hey.” Sitting completely upright, Clint scooted down the couch a foot from Laura, reaching out to draw Cooper into the space between them and dropping his arm around his son's shoulders. Cooper leaned into his father, accepting the comfort that the actual talk with his aunt clearly hadn't brought him. Laura reached up to comb her fingers through his hair, adding her own touch to the mix. “She's fine – I can read her like she can read me. If she was holding something back, I'd know it.” Cooper nodded against his shoulder as Clint looked up to meet Laura's eyes, silently asking her if it was a good idea to go on. She nodded, and he sighed. “Doing what we do... did... you know it's not always safe, Coop. You can't always keep yourself in one piece when you're protecting other people. Sometimes terrible things happen and you can't stop them.” A flash of blue and silver in front of his eyes - _not now, goddamnit punk, not_ now. “And sometimes people want to hurt other people just because they can, or they don't like them for reasons that are just stupid. This was one of those times, got it? The man who did this, they'll catch him. He won't be able to hurt anyone again, least of all Auntie Nat. She can take care of herself.”

“But bombs are so big,” Cooper almost-whispered.

“And bombs are still scared of Auntie Nat.” Laura smiled at the stupid joke, and even though Cooper didn't, Clint could feel a slight relaxing of his body against his. Clint nudged him in the ribs, nodding when he turned to catch his eye. “Why don't you and Lila go drag down Life and the Uno deck? We'll play a few rounds before dinner.”

Cooper's eyes widened a little with hope. “Pizza?”

“Pizza,” Clint answered, unable to contain a chuckle at his son's enthusiasm for one of his own favorite foods.

He didn't sprint for the stairs like he normally would, still too overall down about the entire day for that level of enthusiasm, but Cooper did push himself off the couch and start upstairs with more energy than he'd had when he returned the phone. Laura slipped it into her pocket as she watched him go, then looked at her husband with dark, troubled eyes. “After a day like this, Nat would at least want to tell us she was still fine before she went to bed. It isn't even that late over there.”

Mentally calculating the time difference, Clint had to admit she was right; it was barely after nine, hardly “sleeping” time on a normal schedule, but one that made more sense for a former S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and current Avenger that had flown trans-Atlantic, attended a funeral, and then been a possible target of a bombing all in one day. “She's done a lot in the last twenty-four hours, and being next to an explosion's not all that calming... but you're right.” His own frown deepened. “She'd at least say goodnight.”

“I don't like this, Clint.” 

“I don't either, but we can't do anything about it. Not from here. We can call in the morning, see what progress they've made – if they send her out, she'll text us.” Knowing they were worried and especially after that chewing out by Laura, Nat would make sure to keep them in the loop about her well-being. It wasn't much, but it was what they had to go on without Clint diving back into the fray.

Laura opened her mouth to respond, but before she could get a word out there was a succession of crashing, clattering bangs from the second floor, almost right above their heads in the small room the kids kept most of their toys in. She closed her eyes in resignation as light metallic and plastic jingling danced above them, coming to a halt after a few seconds, before Cooper's voice came down the stairs, muffled by the walls in the way. “Uhhh... Mom? Dad?”

Clint sighed, levering himself off the couch slowly to give himself time to prepare for the mess he was about to encounter. “I've got this, you finish your drink.” 

“I'm officially making new shelves in that closet your next project.”

He winced just a bit as another, smaller sequence of crashes came through the ceiling. “Definitely.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is - retroactively - the scene in the movie that made me go "Wait... that can't be all." Specifically, when Clint shows up to get Wanda, he's very direct and brushes over everything that's been going on with the team, saying the line about disappointing his kids. I'm actually fine with that line and delivery, I think it fits perfectly for reasons that will come up in the next two chapters, but in some ways it did sound like Clint had completely divorced himself from the team and that just did not jive with me. Time constraints, it's not his movie and he's not a pivotal viewpoint in it, but just thinking about it logically there is no way in hell that Clint hadn't been paying attention to what happened with Wanda in Lagos, the Accords, and _especially_ the explosion at the UN. The team are his friends, he considers some of them family. He _trusts them_ with the secret of the farm and his wife and children. "Retired" does not mean "completely disconnected," and what happens to the team still affects him, especially if it happens to Nat. I wanted to show he was still a part of their lives and they were still a part of his, and that not everything was perfect when Steve called him to come help. Next up... exactly that.
> 
> Not a lot of trivia this time since this section was pretty much worry and angst, but let's get to it.
> 
> -This is the part of the film where it starts to be a little hard to keep a timeline straight (it falls apart like a Jenga tower later but we'll get to that), so I did my best to guesstimate what happened when. The funeral and the signing definitely happen on the same day and seemingly in very close proximity since Steve and Sam have lunch/coffee/whatever with Sharon while Nat travels to Vienna and the bombing happens, and since it's still day/afternoon light by the time Sharon's on the scene and not apparently fading into evening the funeral had to be early. Rough guesstimate, but it seems to fall out as well as can be expected.  
> -The time difference between Iowa and London is 6 hours (GMT-5 to GMT+1) and 7 hours between Iowa and Vienna (GMT-5 to GMT+2).  
> -Nat walks up to T'Challa still holding her phone, which is what prompted me to put her talk with Clint right then. It's them; as soon as either he heard about it or she had a free moment, one would be calling the other for reassurances.  
> -The news report Steve, Sam, and Sharon listen to mentions seventy injured and at least twelve dead; with the time it took the trio to fly partway across the continent, I thought it was justified to bump the numbers. That is a fucking huge bomb, and at the moment the police realize what it is and start yelling for everyone to run, there's over twenty people on screen. I'm assuming all of them were either injured or killed in the blast since they had bare seconds to get clear.  
> -One of my favorite authors has a quote that I think sums up Laura in this section perfectly: "Men will fight bravely and be heroes, but for last-ditch defense against any odds... get a Mother." People (including me) joke about Clint having a flock, but hawks mate for life, so _they_ have a flock together, and Nat's a part of that flock. Laura will tear anyone who threatens her to shreds if she can get her hands on them, Nat herself not excepted if she does something dumb.  
>  -In my rewatches of AoU and CW, I noticed that Clint seems to have a thing about touch, in that he touches (and is touched by) people he's very comfortable with and no one else. Like, no pats on the shoulder like Tony and Thor sometimes do, stuff like that; he'll hang _around_ people but not physically engage. The only one he touches outside of combat or medical treatment before the team gets to the farm is Nat, but once he's with his family he's either constantly touching them (hugging and kissing, picking up his kids) or they're touching him. I find it very sweet that he has a group of people he's so comfortable with, since it's probably left over issues from his shitty childhood, which is why it crops up so much with Laura and the kids in this story. Wanda will obviously be the other major subject of it coming up.  
>  -I slipped in another nod to Fraction with the pizza thing. MCU!Clint seems to like being self-sufficient so I figure he _can_ cook some things, if not gourmet, and holy hell did you see their grill that is not a grill a casual user buys, but pizza's still his favorite takeout food and what he'll default to if he needs an I-can't-be-bothered meal.  
>  -My mom's favorite game was Uno, so I used it for Barton Family Game Night. She was an absolute _demon_ with those cards.
> 
> ...okay, more than I expected! Welp, I'm gonna go start on the next part - see you guys next time!


End file.
